Top 101 Quotes & Sayings by Ethan Canin - Page 2

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

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

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?'

I finished 'America America,' and I knew I had to write another book, not just for personal reasons but because I had a contract.

I like medicine. Even if I was selling a million books a year, I would still be a doctor.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 teach a 14-week semester, and one of the things I do when I have to teach literature is, for the first half hour of the class, I have the students write the beginning of a new story every week. At the end of the semester, even if they have learned nothing about literature, at least they'll have 14 beginnings that they can take with them.

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

As I write, I try to be the character.

It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.

Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.

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

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.

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

I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.

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.

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 some advantages to being a writer: you do generally get better as you get older. I think I understand things better. When I was a kid, I was kind of guessing at the emotion. Now I'm interested in writing more difficult books, books that confront the facts of life, of death and dying and failure - the majority of life. You write outwardly imaginative books when you're younger. When you're older you apply imagination to internal experience.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I think talent has a huge amount to do with concentration, concentration rather than the athletic ability of your neurons. If you can concentrate on an esoteric piece of math, how can you think about the rest of your life? That's why people can leave their car keys in the gutter; they're in the midst of obsession and concentration.

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.

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.