Ethan Canin Quotes

The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.

I understand the self-loathing and the resentment, and the discipline that it takes to sit down in front of a typewriter or computer every single day, whether it's going well or not going well.

I still get up every morning at 4 A.M. I write seven days a week, including Christmas. And I still face a blank page every morning, and my characters don't really care how many books I've sold.

I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.

I don't pick roles based on how famous they are going to make me; I pick roles based on how they're going to inspire me intellectually.

I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.

I had my Aunt Rosie, who was famous and then not, so I got a lesson in fame early on. And I understood how little it has to do with you. And also how you could use it.

I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.

I don't think writers should have writer's block. I think they should write. Imagine you were a bus driver and you said, 'I've got bus driver's block.' Get over it.

For me to get up and feel the urge to go to the set and all that, I have to feel there is something tremendously vibrating to achieve there. I need to lose sometimes a consciousness of the person and the reality in order to be happy to come back into the reality and happier to live it for this cause, to be an artist in this life.

My biggest bits of advice are, write as much as you can, finish what you start, get a thick skin, don't take crap from anyone, but also live your life and have fun. The stereotype of a writer holed up alone all day is really unhelpful. You can't write real people and real emotion if you don't let yourself experience them.

When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write.

I watched artists who blew up before me become parodies of themselves. I wasn't listening to people when they told me that I had nothing to say, and I can't listen to people now when they tell me I'm the bomb, even though I want to.

Psychology is important but motivation is something that if you don't have it inside then you can't provide it.

I just said, 'I need to do something because staying up and watching YouTube and late night TV is not cool,' so I just decided to write a script.

How can I stop acting? I don't think there is a full stop. Maybe the only time I will stop will be when acting stops fascinating me. I will have to find something that fascinates me more.

When 'If God Was a Banker' became a success, it changed my entire perspective. I wanted to write more and wanted to be lot more successful as a writer.

I say it's easier to write for other people than write for myself.

You get early inoculation against the idea of success if you're a poet. When I published my first collection of sonnets, I sold about five copies; now kids study them for A level. Wanting to be successful in that other world of money or fame is not interesting. Poetry isn't like that, and it never has been.

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway.

The how-to is all about day in, day out finding a way to feed the monster, the drive that lives inside.

Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.

If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty-bound to spread around like manure. Fertilize those young minds!

What makes me put pen to paper? You know, that's the million-dollar question. I've been writing since I've been reading. It's not a question I think that's even meant to be answered, but it's something you always seek to discover the answer to. And the process of filmmaking is one of discovery, and self-discovery at that. Pleasure... it's not exactly what I would call fun, but it's absorbing.