You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.
— Ethan Canin
To me, point of view is everything.
I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.
You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.
I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.
The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.
It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.
When I went for my medical school interview, I had an old paperback of 'Henderson the Rain King' in the pocket of my coat. I was wearing the best clothes I had - a pair of cords and a sport coat - but when I got to the office, all the other interviewees were lined up in their black suits.
I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.
I never set out to be a published writer.
I was born in Ann Arbor. I lived for a while in Ohio; Pennsylvania, California for 10 years, and now in Boston. And I lived in Iowa for a couple of years, where I studied at the Writers Workshop.
Doubt is the enemy of mania. It's trying to get aloft strung with weights. The moment I like writing is three sentences in, when somehow those weights drop away, and you can invent. I cannot tell you the dread I have.
Why say 'utilize' when you can say 'use'?
I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.
John Cheever was the first writer I ever read who sort of had that similar sensation that, you know, life is nasty, miserable, brutish and short, but that occasionally, there's a certain river of light, a kind word, a telling gesture that sort of illuminates something.
I have a very bad memory. I can't remember my own life very well.
As I write, I try to be the character.
I finished 'America America,' and I knew I had to write another book, not just for personal reasons but because I had a contract.
My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'
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.
I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.
Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.
I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.
If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.
It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.
I like medicine. Even if I was selling a million books a year, I would still be a doctor.
Bausch is a wonderful storyteller. He's a mature writer who has a lot of confidence in the quality of character. He doesn't need to hook you with a sneaky plot and zany characters.
Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.
I'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.
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.
There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.
Your first book is kind of a labor of ignorance. You don't realize the difficulty of it. Your second book is sort of a labor of fear. Then you sort of either hit a stride, or you don't.
There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.
I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation.
I teach a 14-week semester, and one of the things I do when I have to teach literature is, for the first half hour of the class, I have the students write the beginning of a new story every week. At the end of the semester, even if they have learned nothing about literature, at least they'll have 14 beginnings that they can take with them.
The only successful way to write, and the only one I have found, is to be the character. Give up on trying to control them. Writers always talk about hearing voices. That's what they mean.
A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.
I think one of the things that is essential for happiness in life, or at least for non-sadness, is producing something. I guess that's why I spend so much time and agony writing books. But working on carpentry is sort of like all the pleasure with none of the agony.
I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.
I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.
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.
I don't want to be movie-star famous. I want to move people with my writing.
Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.
It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.
I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.
I've discovered over the years that being subject to both the adoration and the vilification actually makes me more disciplined. It makes me understand that it's the idea of writing a great book that propels me now, whereas it used to be the idea of success.
Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.
Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.
Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.
