Ethan Canin Quotes

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Ethan Canin

Profession : Author

Birth : July 19, 1960

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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?'

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin