Modesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy.

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.