A biography for Ethan Caninhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.”
“Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.”
“No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.”
“It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.”
“Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.”
“I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.”
“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.”
“I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.”
“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 can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'”
“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.”
“A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.”
“Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.”
“It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.”
“Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.”
“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.”
“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 even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'”