Ethan Canin Quotes
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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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Writers of literature make very little money.
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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 like certain people's work better than my own.
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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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Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.
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I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.
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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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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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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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You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.
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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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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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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'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.
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The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.
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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 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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I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.
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There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.
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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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It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
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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.