Ethan Canin Quotes

And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.

Part of George R.R. Martin's brilliant storytelling is taking the carpet out from under your feet.

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.

The writers are very good about misdirection and changeups, and that's what's great about it. We always think we know what's going to happen and then they throw a curveball that you don't see coming.

The cloud never comes from the quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.

I like people to be surprised by the turn of events. I don't want things just to be pat and formulaic. If there's some sort of internal combustion in the character or a desire to change the way things are going, that makes for conflict, which is the essence of drama.

We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

I don't know what's going to happen in life, so I don't think it's fair that I know what's going to happen in 'Homeland.'

I'm one of those crazy people, if I'm watching the trailer for a movie and I'm really excited by it, I'll turn it off because I don't want to know anything. I want to be surprised because I love that more than knowing anything.

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

I like the idea of shows where I don't know where I'll be at the end of the season.

The problem in cinema is that you can never predict what will happen.

I hate to lull the audience into letting them think that something is something. It's always fun to defy expectations.

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.

I hate to go to movies or watch a TV show and know the ending within 15 minutes.

What I always got excited about with 'Arrested Development' was the element of surprise.

I always feel that a viewer has an expectation about every moment of the film and where it's going, so if I act against that, I've created a twist. In fact, it becomes a kind of game with the expectations of the viewer. This is the superficial appearance. In the layer beneath, there is a hidden theme.

I never look at twists as a way to trick the audience. Obviously, I think a good story has surprises and unexpected turns, and you always want to do that with an audience. But it has nothing to do with conning them or making them believe so strongly in one thing and then kind of going the other way.

Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think

You always have to be ahead of the audience so that they have to always catch up and know the movie's not quite going exactly where you think it's going, or expecting it to be going.

Many of the things which can never be, often are.

Things never happen exactly how you think they will.

Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption.

I asked you what you wanted and you said you didn't want anything. And I told you I wasn't planning on giving you anything; I was planning on giving you something.

It is pardonable to be defeated, but never to be surprised.