Quotes from 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.

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

No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.

Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.

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

There has always been a tension in my life between the romantic and the practical. I can't hole myself up in a cabin and write down ideas for the rest of my life. I also need to be able to clean out a dog bite.

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.

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.

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.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'

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.

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 Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

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

Once he was going, it was difficult to stop him. "Mathematics is like carving a wooden doll," he said, "and then, one day, you watch as your wooden doll gives birth to another wooden doll." These words have stayed with me all my life.

Now she was smiling. "And while you're at it," she said, "here's another one for you. Theodicy. That's another word Leibniz used. As long as you have the dictionary out, you might as well look 'em both up." She sipped her tea. "He wrote a whole book about it, as a matter of fact.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

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.

When you're in medicine - especially when you're a resident in a public hospital - you feel like you're doing your part. But not when you're a writer.

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.

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.

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

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

Every time I'd sing or play piano when I was a child, my dad would yell up from the basement, 'That's B-flat!'

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.