The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.