Ethan Canin Quotes

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

People are more than two-dimensional, and again I think the complexities in life, and in one's makeup, grow as you get older, partly through experience.

[Before the Spirit] I had been producing comic books for 15-year-old cretins from Kansas [I wanted to aim for] a 55-year-old who had his wallet stolen on the subway. You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid.

Forty-years-old these days is the beginning of people's lives. I've found myself, I'm confident, I'm mature, I've been through some stuff, I'm ready to write my book.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.

I don't know if it's that the scripts are evolving or just that I'm getting older, but the characters become more interesting as you get older because you've lived more life at different stages. You've loved; you've lost; you have more of that journey.

I was just 20 years old when I wrote Broken Arrow.

If a man becomes more mature due to certain episodes in his life, it gives him the opportunity to look at life in a much more deep way. I believe the artist and the man work parallel, with the same feelings, the same soul, the same sensitivity.

The work gets more difficult as you get older. You learn more and you gather more experiences, there is deeper pain and higher highs.

I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that's humanly true.

I suppose I was waiting until I was old enough to have some sort of experience to sing about. When you're young, it's hard to sing the blues. Nobody believes you.

When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me. When I hit 50, I added five more lessons and the paper ran the column again.

I want to write about grown-up things.

Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.

As an actor, I'm not sure what I had to offer the world of tragedy and comedy when I was 21. I hadn't lived a whole lot. By my middle 30s, you know, I had been knocked around a little bit.

Acting, according to me, gets better with time and age. The more experiences you have in life, the more you have seen, the better equipped you are to deal with complexity and bring out the depth in characters.

There is something interesting about a face that has lived.

We're both getting older, our children are starting to leave home. But I can say that I'm just as passionate a songwriter now in my 50s as I was in my 20s. But instead of talking about the general kind of angst that I felt as a teenager, I'm writing about more specific issues.

How can you sing a line like, 'I've fallen out of love' when you're 18? You need to experience something of life before you can sing it.

It's a shame that when you've actually lived some life and have something to write about, they're saying you're too old to come out and play it.

I think all my life's story is condensed in my face. It is neither innocent nor coy. It speaks volumes.

All the issues you deal with get more complicated as you get older; it takes more focus to write songs that reflect what you've gone through.

I had to have experience, you know what I mean? Because I've been doing this since I was 14... I couldn't write about anything at 14. I had to live some life. I definitely lived some life.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.