Wordstruck is exactly what I was—and still am: crazy about the sound of words, the look of words, the taste of words, the feeling for words on the tongue and in the mind.

Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998.

I grew up in kind of the last generation of Canadians who thought things that were happening in Britain were more important, almost, than what was happening in Canada. And my mother was fervently of that opinion.

Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

I think one of the lessons we learn in life - and it's an old lesson, but each of us has to learn it, if he does, individually - and that is that, in human relations, particularly sexual relations and so on, the person you might most trust and feel most comfortable and easy with isn't necessarily the person your heart is going to fall for.

Television has created a nation of news junkies who tune in every night to get their fix on the world.

You learn, just as you learn good manners, how to approach things with a certain amount of diplomacy.