Ethan Canin Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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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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People are surprised when Hollywood characters act the way a real person would.
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No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.
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There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.
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I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.
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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.
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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.
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It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
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You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.
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I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.
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I like certain people's work better than my own.
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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.
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It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.
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To me, point of view is everything.
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I'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.
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When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.
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There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.