The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

I don't think it's a question of whether you eat meat. It's a question of what kind of meat, and where it comes from.

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?