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.

In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.

Each man creates god in his own image.

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.

For the record, pot, like the Reader's Digest , is not necessarily habit-forming, but both can lead to hard-core addiction : heroin, in one case, abridged bad books, in the other. Either way you look at it, a withdrawal from a meaningful life.

The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.