The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

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

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

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.