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

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.

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

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 obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

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

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months, but you don't earn the fourth without it.