Each man creates god in his own image.

Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.

I had, like any other young novelist, started out by believing the difficult thing was to get published and that, once you managed that, well, your financial problems were over. I discovered, like any other serious novelist, that actually they had only just begun.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

I'm criticized by the feminists, by the Jewish establishment, by Canadian nationalists. And why not? I've had my pot shots at them. I'm fair game.

Actually, when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene, nobody outdoes Canadians, myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation.