Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.

Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character...tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game.

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

Americans like to make money, Canadians like to count it.

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.