I just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.

Toronto is hard to capture in a few strokes.

Paranoia can be a sign of a sanity in some circumstances, in some places and times.

Absurdity isn't quite so absurd as it once was.

I love poetry, read it a lot, but make no claim to being able to write it.

The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.

We're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.

It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.

I seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one.

We want to know that we're not alone with our loneliness or loss.

Science is claiming ever more ground from popular stories of the kind we thought we weren't to believe in.

The only thing that I miss lately in all music is somebody that will put out a melody that you can whistle. It doesn't seem like there's anything happening like that.

A lot of my movies have come to be thought about only years after the fact, and I'm sad about that but also happy about it in a way, as it's given them longevity.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy communicating and connecting.

When we wallow in guilt, remorse, and shame over real or imagined sins of the past, we are disdaining God's gift of grace.

Many people who help me encounter a lot of resistance from other people and from forces.

These feelings you engender in me, my lord, are most indelicate. You should stop causing them immediately.

As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd.

There are social restrictions where someone could be suppressing someone else's freedom to express themselves.

The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.

People who are not willing to respect not only the given law, but our democratic way of life, should not live in Europe.