Ethan Canin Quotes

Author Image

Ethan Canin

Profession : Author

Birth : July 19, 1960

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.

Ethan Canin

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?

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

No one knows why books do well.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

Fame is a problem of perspective.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

What's more interesting than the arc of lives?

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin