The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.

We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

In this neighbourhood people don't venture out after dark. It's not safe for them. Only the terminally stupid and the criminally motivated come out at this hour.

A good deed that follows upon another is the reward for the first one, and an evil deed that follows upon another is a punishment for the first one.

We recruit for attitude and train for skill,

If you play it safe in life you've decided that you don't want to grow anymore.

I would rather not watch myself in movies. I enjoy the experience, but I won't really see the film until they're on cable deep on into my life so I can pretend it's someone else at another time.

Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.

Everyone makes choices in life. Some bad, some good. It's called living, and if you want to bow out, then go right ahead. But don't do it halfway. Don't linger in whiner's limbo.

When we cannot hope to win, it is an advantage to yield.

Don't make it necessary for me to complain about you to Christ crucified. (There is no one else I can complain to, since there is no one greater than you on earth.

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.