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.

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

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.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

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

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