Ethan Canin Quotes

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Art is so personal. I'm very comforted by the fact that certain movies that I love, other people hate. Certain books that I love, other people hate. You can't please everybody.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.

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.

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

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.

You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

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.

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.

To have too much time is not good, you have to force yourself. And human beings aren't meant for true freedom. I've learned that, having had it.

As soon as we conform anything to language, we’ve changed it. Use a word and you’ve altered the world. The poets know this. It’s what they try so hard to avoid.

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

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.

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

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