Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

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.

The greatest solitude

When you want to do something that isn’t the ‘norm’ you will be made to feel like you have a problem and if you hear it often enough then you start to believe it too.

If fame is to come only after death, I am in no hurry for it.

Journalism is often simply the industrialisation of gossip.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

I walk around at 150-152 pounds to weigh 147 pounds. Other boxers weigh around 160-170 before coming down.

An Englishman does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

I'm not really a fan of people who think they're better than others. There's no reason to act that way. I couldn't even stand to yell at someone if they bumped right into me.

What are we but our stories?

There is no way to find yourself until you discover how utterly to lose yourself.