We spent a month in Japan last year, a week in Istanbul for the United Nations, and nearly three months in my native Nova Scotia, where my two brothers have homes; and we'll go back there this summer.

The greatest luxury is being able to go to movies and plays now and then in the afternoons.

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.

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

Words make another place, a place to escape to with your spirit alone.

I never wanted to be a pundit.

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.