If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.

Listen your Lordship, I'm a respecter of institutions. Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn't inhale.

And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?

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

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.