If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.

A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others.

There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.

Nothing is absolute any longer. There is a choice of beliefs and a choice of truths to go with them. If you choose not to choose then there is no truth at all. There are only points of view.

There are ten commandments, right? Well, it's like an exam. You get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class.

I'm criticized by the feminists, by the Jewish establishment, by Canadian nationalists. And why not? I've had my pot shots at them. I'm fair game.

Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.

Each man creates god in his own image.

Edmonton is not the end of the world but you can certainly see it from there.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

You were nothing more than a daydream that a beautiful heart was bound to fall in love with, and daydreams aren't real and beautiful hearts trust easily, fall fast and crash hard.

Before, I suspected I might not amount to anything, and now I now I won't, so at least it takes away the wearisome burden of delusive hope

And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn't happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening.

Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it.

The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?

Union and Communion: this is the essence of Christianity.

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

Obsession can be a great thing or it can also destroy lives.

It is typically Norwegian to be good

I think it's important to make art that is not that easily absorbable, that is a challenge to the authorities.