QUOTES by Ethan Canin
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Ethan Canin
I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.
Quote by -Ethan Canin
'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.
Quote by -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.
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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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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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I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.
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It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
Quote by -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.
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I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.
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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.
Quote by -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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
Quote by -Ethan Canin
I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.
Quote by -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?'
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
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No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.
Quote by -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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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