You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

Enchanted islands are hard to understand, ' he said. 'I've always thought that. It worried me even as a child. The trouble is that you can never be sure where the enchantment begins and where it ends.

Ever day you spend at work is a foundation for your future.

She fails to see who I am, even, for her eyes do not, will not, take me in. Instead they transmit a powerful message. She is like a billboard flashing, starkly: 'Keep Out'.

If you can't be thankful for what you receive be thankful for what you escape.

Issues are never simple. One thing I'm proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

Sometimes there's a tackiness about Route 66 that out-tacks any tackiness I've ever seen anywhere else. And the Meramec Caverns are the pinnacle of that tack.

Some fatherlands are difficult. Germany is one of them. But it is our fatherland. Here is where we live and work.

I think humans are driven by othering people, by defining themselves by who they are not and who is different from them. Human beings are in love with othering.

I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it?

Be a life long student, read as many books as possible.