Ethan Canin Quotes
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I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.
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There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.
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It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.
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I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.
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If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
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I have a very bad memory. I can't remember my own life very well.
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Your first book is kind of a labor of ignorance. You don't realize the difficulty of it. Your second book is sort of a labor of fear. Then you sort of either hit a stride, or you don't.
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Why say 'utilize' when you can say 'use'?
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You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.
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A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
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It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.
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Fame is a problem of perspective.
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To have too much time is not good, you have to force yourself. And human beings aren't meant for true freedom. I've learned that, having had it.
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If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.
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When you're in medicine - especially when you're a resident in a public hospital - you feel like you're doing your part. But not when you're a writer.
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I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name?
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What's more interesting than the arc of lives?
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There are some advantages to being a writer: you do generally get better as you get older. I think I understand things better. When I was a kid, I was kind of guessing at the emotion. Now I'm interested in writing more difficult books, books that confront the facts of life, of death and dying and failure - the majority of life. You write outwardly imaginative books when you're younger. When you're older you apply imagination to internal experience.
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Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.
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I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.
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I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'
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Families tend to artificially divide the world, imbuing one member with all the attributes and another with all the faults. But it's never that way.
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I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.
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A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.