Top 50 Ethan Canin Quotes

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

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.

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.’

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Writers of literature make very little money.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I started out writing stories because that’s all I wanted to read, but now I don’t know if I’ll ever write one again.

To me, point of view is everything.

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

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

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?

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.’

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.

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

I like certain people’s work better than my own.

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?’

As I write, I try to be the character.

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

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.

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

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

What’s more interesting than the arc of lives?

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

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

I never set out to be a published writer.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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