If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting; in any case it happens. It's the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn't put there.

In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.

If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.