Ethan Canin Quotes

Author Image

Ethan Canin

Profession : Author

Birth : July 19, 1960

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

I never set out to be a published writer.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin