Ethan Canin Quotes

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

I might not write fiction in the literary sense. But I write very well. My characters are good. My dialogue is good. And my stories are really involving.

A lot of actors look at scripts and think, 'How will this stretch me as an actor?' But I always thought, 'Do I want to turn the page? Is this going to make people laugh?'

I will say there is only one caveat as far as 'Logan' goes: I got to the end and went, 'OK, what happens next?' To me, as an audience member, damn. If you can get to the end of the third act of a trilogy and your reaction is 'what the hell happens next,' someone did their job incredibly.

You can tell how good a filmmaker is if you can turn the sound down but you can still feel the story.

My biggest lesson ... was to try and create narrators that were believable. ...so the listener becomes really invested in the story or the song.

Journalism should be truthful and entertaining. You know, with news and important facts you can entertain people too. Have a little humor. Life isn't all that deadly all the time, but while you're having fun, tell the truth. If every word of a column is deadly serious, I can't read it. It makes me throw up.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

I stopped reading William Faulkner because it's hard work. I want to read a good writer, but I also want to read something where the pages are going to move along. That's what I want. It doesn't have to be a thriller or a mystery. Just something where I get caught up in the story.

The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in extraordinary shape-shifting prose that makes this not just an important novel, but a remarkable read.

I don't know if you've ever seen this film called Elite Squad, which, actually Wagner [Moura] is the one narrating that. José Padilha, one of creators of our show, that's where the style comes from. It has a heavy narrator. But I thought about it a lot. You [the viewers] have to work for the show, unless you're bilingual. It's a really aggressive type of filming, it's engaging, you've got to read.

That's one of the great thing about writing is that you get to be in someone's head.

I love REAL set construction and think that sets are very important part of the storytelling and scope of a film.

What I do when I write is I just write the way I would tell it, so it comes out just exactly the way I would talk to you.

Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.

As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alley of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bag and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page. Believe me, they'll thank you for it.

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.

It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.

I think knowing you're not alone is important. This generation is already better at standing up for themselves, saying, "No! You're not going to treat me like that. My standards are higher." But we can provide more education through stories. Just because someone who is older or with more authority says you have to do something, there's no reason you need to. One good thing is that there are new rules about how old you can be on set - more regulations. I think those are good.

Stories match the way our species thinks. Equally important, stories are something we share - everyone everywhere tells stories and oddly enough, in the same way. It all probably started around some campfire a million years ago.

For me, I think it's such an important thing to hear other people's stories, because you do find ways that either you can learn something from them, or you can identify with something that they've gone through. You realize that maybe what you're going through in life isn't just specific to you, that somebody else understands it, or you talk to someone and all of sudden you see something in a completely different way because of what they've said to you or shared with you.

Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over.

It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.

What's great about good writing is that it feels like life, so it's not hard to relate to her circumstances.

Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.