Ethan Canin

“It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“No one knows why books do well.”

“What's more interesting than the arc of lives?”

“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 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.”

“'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I never set out to be a published writer.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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'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 no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.”

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

“As I write, I try to be the character.”

“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!'”