The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

Time bears away all things.

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

Design is coming to grips with one’s real lifestyle, one’s real place in the world. Rooms should not be put together for show but to nourish one’s wellbeing.

My father was everything to me. Unlike my mother - I didn't have a special affinity with her.

A foreign nation is a kind of contemporaneous posterity.

What's important at this time is to re-clarify the difference between hero and villain.

I try to get up every day.

Canadians want to see real hope restored, not false hopes raised.

Don't try and save yourself. The self that is trying to be saved is not you.

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.