It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.

Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.

The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.