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

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

Work Years Year

I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.

Ethan Canin

Mom Men Write

There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.

Ethan Canin

Us T Step

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.

Ethan Canin

Art You Words

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

Ethan Canin

Ways Way Very

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

Ethan Canin

Love Yin Writing

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.

Ethan Canin

War Great Death

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!'

Ethan Canin

Time Men Yell

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.

Ethan Canin

Time World Wit

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.

Ethan Canin

Life You Writer

I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.

Ethan Canin

Teacher Type Them

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

Success Great Years

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

You Write Very

I like medicine. Even if I was selling a million books a year, I would still be a doctor.

Ethan Canin

Year Would Till

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

Ethan Canin

Useful Use Us

I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.

Ethan Canin

Great Writer Write

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

Work Life You

Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.

Ethan Canin

Writing Up Tin

I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.

Ethan Canin

Power Us Those

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

Art Writing Unhappy

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

Ethan Canin

I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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?'

Ethan Canin

The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.

Ethan Canin

I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.

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

I have a very bad memory. I can't remember my own life very well.

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

It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.

Ethan Canin

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

Ethan Canin

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.

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

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

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

I don't want to be movie-star famous. I want to move people with my writing.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

To me, point of view is everything.

Ethan Canin

As I write, I try to be the character.

Ethan Canin

I never set out to be a published writer.

Ethan Canin

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

Ethan Canin

When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

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.

Ethan Canin

I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation.

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

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.'

Ethan Canin