Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become.

Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?

I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it.

Not real can tell us about real.

Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.

I read a piece by a guy out in Alberta that said Canadians are lazy because they're not patenting enough new inventions. I disagree. Canadians invent a lot of stuff. Actually patenting them is expensive.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.