Ethan Canin Quotes

The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.

- Ethan Canin

John Cheever was the first writer I ever read who sort of had that similar sensation that, you know, life is nasty, miserable, brutish and short, but that occasionally, there's a certain river of light, a kind word, a telling gesture that sort of illuminates something.

- Ethan Canin

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.

- Ethan Canin

One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.

- Ethan Canin

Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.

- Ethan Canin

Doubt is the enemy of mania. It's trying to get aloft strung with weights. The moment I like writing is three sentences in, when somehow those weights drop away, and you can invent. I cannot tell you the dread I have.

- Ethan Canin

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

- Ethan Canin

Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.

- Ethan Canin

When I went for my medical school interview, I had an old paperback of 'Henderson the Rain King' in the pocket of my coat. I was wearing the best clothes I had - a pair of cords and a sport coat - but when I got to the office, all the other interviewees were lined up in their black suits.

- Ethan Canin

When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.

- Ethan Canin

It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

- Ethan Canin

I really enjoy the immediacy of the 'knife and gun clubs,' as they're so callously called. Emergency is a great place to learn about people.

- Ethan Canin

What's more interesting than the arc of lives?

- Ethan Canin

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

- Ethan Canin

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

- Ethan Canin

I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.

- Ethan Canin

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

- Ethan Canin

Mathematicians don't like it when they're associated with mental illness and sort of bristle when you say that they can't get along socially, that they're not good with people.

- Ethan Canin

You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong; verbs and nouns.

- Ethan Canin

I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.

- Ethan Canin

Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.

- Ethan Canin

If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.

- Ethan Canin

You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.

- Ethan Canin

I've discovered over the years that being subject to both the adoration and the vilification actually makes me more disciplined. It makes me understand that it's the idea of writing a great book that propels me now, whereas it used to be the idea of success.

- Ethan Canin

In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything.

- Ethan Canin

I think one of the things that is essential for happiness in life, or at least for non-sadness, is producing something. I guess that's why I spend so much time and agony writing books. But working on carpentry is sort of like all the pleasure with none of the agony.

- Ethan Canin

Every time I'd sing or play piano when I was a child, my dad would yell up from the basement, 'That's B-flat!'

- Ethan Canin

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.

- Ethan Canin

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.

- Ethan Canin

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.

- Ethan Canin

I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.

- Ethan Canin

It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.

- Ethan Canin

Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.

- Ethan Canin

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.'

- Ethan Canin

I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.

- Ethan Canin

I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.

- Ethan Canin

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.

- Ethan Canin

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.

- Ethan Canin

My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'

- Ethan Canin

In the winter, I read next to a wood-burning stove. In the summer, we have a place up in Michigan where I like to read in a hammock. It's almost entirely hidden by cedar trees and right up by the water. You can climb in there and see nothing but water and be seen by nobody. It's perfect.

- Ethan Canin

In medical school, you're taught to write in this convoluted, Latinate way. I knew the vocabulary as well as anyone, but I would write kidney instead of nephric. I insisted on using English.

- Ethan Canin

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.

- Ethan Canin

If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.

- Ethan Canin

It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.

- Ethan Canin

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

- Ethan Canin

People are surprised when Hollywood characters act the way a real person would.

- Ethan Canin

When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.

- Ethan Canin

Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.

- Ethan Canin

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.

- Ethan Canin

I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.

- Ethan Canin

I never set out to be a published writer.

- Ethan Canin

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?

- Ethan Canin

Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.

- Ethan Canin

It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.

- Ethan Canin

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

- Ethan Canin

There has always been a tension in my life between the romantic and the practical. I can't hole myself up in a cabin and write down ideas for the rest of my life. I also need to be able to clean out a dog bite.

- Ethan Canin

I like medicine. Even if I was selling a million books a year, I would still be a doctor.

- Ethan Canin

I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.

- Ethan Canin

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.

- Ethan Canin

There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.

- Ethan Canin

I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.

- Ethan Canin

Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.

- Ethan Canin

I'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.

- Ethan Canin

Why say 'utilize' when you can say 'use'?

- Ethan Canin

Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.

- Ethan Canin

Medicine involves dealing with people who are going through changes and cycles, often people trapped in bodies that are going out from under them. Spending time with them lets you think their way, gives you insights as a writer.

- Ethan Canin

I finished 'America America,' and I knew I had to write another book, not just for personal reasons but because I had a contract.

- Ethan Canin

Bausch is a wonderful storyteller. He's a mature writer who has a lot of confidence in the quality of character. He doesn't need to hook you with a sneaky plot and zany characters.

- Ethan Canin

No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.

- Ethan Canin

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

- Ethan Canin

Fame is a problem of perspective.

- Ethan Canin

I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation.

- Ethan Canin

Writers of literature make very little money.

- Ethan Canin

I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.

- Ethan Canin

The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.

- Ethan Canin

I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.

- Ethan Canin

To me, point of view is everything.

- Ethan Canin

'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.

- Ethan Canin

I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.

- Ethan Canin

I have a very bad memory. I can't remember my own life very well.

- Ethan Canin

As I write, I try to be the character.

- Ethan Canin

I don't want to be movie-star famous. I want to move people with my writing.

- Ethan Canin