Ethan Canin
In medical school, you're taught to write in this convoluted, Latinate way. I knew the vocabulary as well as anyone, but I would write kidney instead of nephric. I insisted on using English.Collection: Medical
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.Collection: Medical
I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
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.
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.
I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.
I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.
It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.
I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.
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.
The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.
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.
I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.
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.
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.
The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.
You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.
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.
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?'
I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.
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.
I finished 'America America,' and I knew I had to write another book, not just for personal reasons but because I had a contract.
To me, point of view is everything.
I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation.
As I write, I try to be the character.
You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.
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.
Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.
When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.
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.
One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.
I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.
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.
No one knows why books do well.
It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
Fame is a problem of perspective.
I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.
I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name?
I like certain people's work better than my own.
It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.
Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.
What's more interesting than the arc of lives?
'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.
I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.
If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.
No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.
I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.
Families tend to artificially divide the world, imbuing one member with all the attributes and another with all the faults. But it's never that way.
A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.