Ethan Canin Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

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.

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.

If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.

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

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.

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.

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.