Author Quotes

Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

Before I left the 'Star' last year to write books full-time, I welcomed catastrophe. It was material. Missed planes, broken pipes, dead lawns, digestive disorders, you name it, if it was something that had gone horribly wrong, it was worth banging out 600 words about.

Al Gore, the former vice-president of the United States, lives in a mansion that uses more electricity than the average family's bungalow! David Suzuki rides on a bus that uses more fuel than a Smart car to get across Canada! Oh my God! And this is just the tip of the vanishing iceberg!

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.

Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.

So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice.

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

Nobody does anything for one reason.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

I can't tell a lie - not even when I hear one.

Pandemonium did not reign; it poured.