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

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!

It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

What's it going to be then, eh?