Under the old system - which is now so archaic that a lot of people can't remember it - if you wanted money you had to go to the bank and take the money out in cash form, and you couldn't take out money that you didn't have. But with the credit card you can spend money you don't have, and that is just so tempting.

Everybody was going along thinking that it was a day like any other day, and bang, down went the Twin Towers. Changed everything. So you can't really predict the future, but you can say, "Boy, are those glaciers ever melting." You can measure that, and you can say, "When they're all melted there won't be any Athabasca River," and you can say, "What will happen to the oil sands then?" because you need a lot of water to make that oil. "Where's that going to come from?" You can say things like that.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don't have to think about whether I do these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans our of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly.

Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you've barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems.

Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.