FastSaying

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.

Ethan Canin

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I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.
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When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.
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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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But there's a beginning in an end, you know? It's true that you can't reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh.
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