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

I felt the beginning of a passion, hopeless in the long run, but very nourishing, for identifying myself with people who were not my own, and whose lives were governed by ideas alien to mine.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.

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

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.