Ethan Canin Quotes
-
I teach a 14-week semester, and one of the things I do when I have to teach literature is, for the first half hour of the class, I have the students write the beginning of a new story every week. At the end of the semester, even if they have learned nothing about literature, at least they'll have 14 beginnings that they can take with them.
-
The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.
-
Writers of literature make very little money.
-
I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
-
There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.
-
I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.
-
The only successful way to write, and the only one I have found, is to be the character. Give up on trying to control them. Writers always talk about hearing voices. That's what they mean.
-
I like certain people's work better than my own.
-
People are surprised when Hollywood characters act the way a real person would.
-
I was born in Ann Arbor. I lived for a while in Ohio; Pennsylvania, California for 10 years, and now in Boston. And I lived in Iowa for a couple of years, where I studied at the Writers Workshop.
-
To me, point of view is everything.
-
No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.
-
You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.
-
I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.
-
You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.
-
I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.
-
It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
-
I work with wood a lot. I like building. I think of building. I would love to buy land on some water somewhere and build a house. That'd be nice.
-
Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.
-
The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.
-
It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.
-
I'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.
-
Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.
-
There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.