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

Categorized in : Me World Way Country

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

Ethan Canin

stories writing character

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

Ethan Canin

narrators important together

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

Ethan Canin

ambition fiction thinking

There are some advantages to being a writer: you do generally get better as you get older. I think I understand things better. When I was a kid, I was kind of guessing at the emotion. Now I'm interested in writing more difficult books, books that confront the facts of life, of death and dying and failure - the majority of life. You write outwardly imaginative books when you're younger. When you're older you apply imagination to internal experience.

Ethan Canin

writing kids book

I think talent has a huge amount to do with concentration, concentration rather than the athletic ability of your neurons. If you can concentrate on an esoteric piece of math, how can you think about the rest of your life? That's why people can leave their car keys in the gutter; they're in the midst of obsession and concentration.

Ethan Canin

math people thinking

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.

Ethan Canin

hate book art

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.

Ethan Canin

differences fiction art

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

Ethan Canin

attention facts fiction

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 Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

Ethan Canin

writing book thinking

I work with wood a lot. I like building. I think of building. I would love to buy land on some water somewhere and build a house. That'd be nice.

Ethan Canin

nice land thinking

I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.

Ethan Canin

book people years

If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.

Ethan Canin

couple writing book

To have too much time is not good, you have to force yourself. And human beings aren't meant for true freedom. I've learned that, having had it.

Ethan Canin

ive-learned force too-much

You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.

Ethan Canin

smart book world

You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

Ethan Canin

dies alive

If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.

Ethan Canin

like-you insulting fiction

I really enjoy the immediacy of the 'knife and gun clubs,' as they're so callously called. Emergency is a great place to learn about people.

Ethan Canin

great enjoy gun people

I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.

Ethan Canin

good good-people evil people

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

river you light life

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

more get just novel