Top 55 Ethan Canin Quotes

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Writers of literature make very little money.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

Fame is a problem of perspective.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

To me, point of view is everything.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I never set out to be a published writer.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.’

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

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.

No one knows why books do well.

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.

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.

What’s more interesting than the arc of lives?

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.’

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