Ethan Canin

“To me, point of view is everything.”

“I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Medicine involves dealing with people who are going through changes and cycles, often people trapped in bodies that are going out from under them. Spending time with them lets you think their way, gives you insights as a writer.”

“Why say 'utilize' when you can say 'use'?”

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

“I like certain people's work better than my own.”

“I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good 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.”

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

“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?'”

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

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

“Doubt is the enemy of mania. It's trying to get aloft strung with weights. The moment I like writing is three sentences in, when somehow those weights drop away, and you can invent. I cannot tell you the dread I have.”

“There has always been a tension in my life between the romantic and the practical. I can't hole myself up in a cabin and write down ideas for the rest of my life. I also need to be able to clean out a dog bite.”

“Writers of literature make very little money.”

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

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

“Families tend to artificially divide the world, imbuing one member with all the attributes and another with all the faults. But it's never that way.”