American - Author | July 19, 1960 -
You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong; verbs and nouns.
Ethan Canin
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Mathematicians don't like it when they're associated with mental illness and sort of bristle when you say that they can't get along socially, that they're not good with people.
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The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.
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It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.
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Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.
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The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.
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The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.
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One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.
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I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.
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In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything.
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No one knows why books do well.
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It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
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