You could have sex relatively comfortably on a platform of books, but not on a platform of PDA.s. Hardcover books. Paperbacks might start sliding around. Though I.d still prefer paperbacks to a pile of PDA.s.

I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.

I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.

I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.