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The Great Gatsby
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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Ethan Canin Quotes

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

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

– 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

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

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

– Ethan Canin

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

– Ethan Canin

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

– 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.

– 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

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