ETHAN CANIN

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

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

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.

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.'

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

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?'

Your first book is kind of a labor of ignorance. You don't realize the difficulty of it. Your second book is sort of a labor of fear. Then you sort of either hit a stride, or you don't.

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 like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.

Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.

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

No one knows why books do well.

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.

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.

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.

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

I never set out to be a published writer.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.