My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.

The interesting thing about the religious component, for me, is that Jesus hardly mentions sex at all. He's pretty interested in the poor, he's pretty interested in selling your worldly goods and storing up riches in heaven. However, religious fundamentalists have made it all about sex, and that's like saying, "Look at the sex and we're just not going to talk about what you may be doing in a financial way that is sinful."

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.

How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.