To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.

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.

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework.