Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.

In a country that never wins anything: in Canada, if one of our athletes so much as makes the final in a World Championship, we declare a national holiday.

Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. the internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency.

An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.

When I see someone who reads something of mine and draws something out of it that's very different from my perspective, I think that's actually cool. Sometimes it's worrisome when you feel they badly misinterpret it, but it just says that they're thinking, and they're bringing their own interpretation to bear on it. [...] That's part of the wonderful thing about putting words into the world, and if I was worried about that, I couldn't be a writer.