Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.