Canadian Writer Quotations

Now I am a writer who can command fairly good payments from magazines with large circulations, I very often refuse to write for them and still write sometimes for small magazines for nothing.

Never attribute to malice, that which can be reasonably explained by stupidity.

Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are; they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.

Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost.

I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.

By building relations we create a source of love and personal pride and belonging that makes living in a chaotic world easier.

The whole world loves a maverick and the whole world wants the maverick to achieve something nobler than simple rebellion.

It doesn't really mean a great deal of difference to a life. You live as you wish to do and if a job is oppressing, you leave it. I've done it on several occasions.

I was allowed to wander where I could. Here is a case in which you search for your independence and allow something creative to come out of that.

What I'm going to be given I gather is not the key to the city, which in many cities is the case. It's the freedom medal, and for me freedom has always been associated traditionally within the city.

The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.

I don't believe in kicking away ladders. By that, I mean the ladders by which I ascended as a young writer, small magazines that didn't pay anything, and that sort of thing.

I was unpopular at school just because I was an intellectual. I always answered all the questions off the top of my head but they nevertheless resented because of that.

I believe in that connection between freedom and the city.

My early wounds were the English school system among other things. It wasn't merely the discipline, it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit.

I began even as a boy to realize how wide the world can be for a man of free intelligence.

It even has the same phraseology as the English orders of knighthood, companions and this sort of thing.

My split with the university was over the fact that I had become involved with helping Tibetans in India.

When you act dramatically in that way it often has a consequence that is very negative.

I suppose I'm led to do so by the fact of what happened to my contemporaries - people whom I've admired, people who I thought were ten times better than me when I was in my twenties and early thirties. I may have been right.

The few wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them.

I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary.

Orwell was the sort of man who was full of grievances. He was very loyal. Once he got to know you, he was extremely loyal. He hated passionately and irrationally.

They decided that unpaid leave could only be granted through the decision of a council that consisted almost entirely of scientists who couldn't understand my reasons for wanting to go so. They said no, no unpaid. So I immediately resigned.

You can be bound by physical things, as I am by certain sicknesses, but nevertheless you can still be free to recognize that all initiatives really come from yourself if you don't depend upon structures of government or structures of any kind.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.

The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.

I suppose, a person for whom freedom is the most important thing - intellectual freedom and, as far as possible, physical freedom.

We don't allow people to be knights, to be knighted by the Queen of England, but we do allow them to become members of the Order of Canada.

They don't have the language or the skills or the knowledge - and if you put them all together, you have a complete communication block.

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

Structures are fine as long as they are controlled by the people who actually work within the structures, but they're dicey even there.