I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

You don't drown by falling in the water

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, where everything was in a strip mall.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

This bread I break was once the oat, This wine upon a foreign tree Plunged in its fruit; Man in the day or wind at night Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

When I was younger I was obsessed with writing, so even if I wanted to listen, I didnt have time.

The greater the share the people have in government, the less liberty, civil or religious, does a nation enjoy.

Discovery hapens in the overlap of difference communities... in the clashes of difference.

Send out love and harmony, put your mind and body in a peaceful place, and then allow the universe to work in the perfect way that it knows how.