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.

Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.

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

It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

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

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