Ethan Canin Quotes

Alas! Alas! Life is full of disappointments; as one reaches one ridge there is always another and a higher one beyond which blocks the view.

What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had for it.

When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.

I write books that will make 10 or 12 hours disappear, and hopefully they'll resonate with you for a few days, where you'll remember the characters and the story. That suits me fine; I am happy with that.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

My dreams have become puny with the reality my life has become.

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I'm a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

How disappointment tracks the steps of hope.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.