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.
Ethan Canin
I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.
There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.
You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong; verbs and nouns.
I'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.
Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.
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.
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!'
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.
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.
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'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.
If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.
I like medicine. Even if I was selling a million books a year, I would still be a doctor.
Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.
I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.
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.
Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.
I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
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.
I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.
I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.
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.
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?'
The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.
I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.
When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.
I have a very bad memory. I can't remember my own life very well.
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.
It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.
You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 don't want to be movie-star famous. I want to move people with my writing.
Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.
To me, point of view is everything.
As I write, I try to be the character.
I never set out to be a published writer.
No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.
When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.
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.
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.
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.
I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation.
It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.
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.'
