Top 101 Quotes & Sayings by Ethan Canin

Writers of literature make very little money.

What's more interesting than the arc of lives?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.'

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!'

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I never set out to be a published writer.

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.

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

To me, point of view is everything.

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.

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.

Fame is a problem of perspective.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

No one knows why books do well.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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