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Quotes by Canadian Authors
"Excellence prospers in the absence of excuses."
"I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful."
"I've gone through back surgery a couple times, and of course, my radiation treatments for six weeks got me to the point where I was not able to play at the level that I was accustomed to."
"For some reason I did something where I realized I could get a reaction. That was when I broke out of my shell at school, because I really didn't have any friends or anything like that and I just kind of was going along, and then finally I did this zany thing, and all of a sudden I had tons of friends."
"I often buy myself presents. Sometimes I will spend $100,000 in one day in a posh boutique."
"People are often wary of reading or watching anything in the horror genre because in their minds, it's just senseless gore, death and violence. Well, I can tell you from avid experience, that's not what horror is about. The horror genre teaches us that sometimes really bad things happen to really good people, but that hope always prevails in even the darkest of situations. That's a very important lesson, no matter how frightening you think the teacher is, and to be in the top of her class, all you need to do is to go in with an open mind."
"You have to remember the band played from 1960 to 1965, every night. You get into a rut playing nightclubs every night, and you didn't want to run it into the ground."
"In terms of my own film experience, I'm definitely used to morose and very heavy, heavy dramas."
"We understand more than we know."
"A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories."
"I guess there is also an element of deliberate change involved. Each of my books has been, at least from my point of view, radically different from the last."
"You're not exactly up for the Humanitarian of the Year award, so save your altruism for someone who can't see through you like cellophane."
"I have some assets that over time will be worth something. I've been in the process of selling others."
"I can't do talk shows, I don't do them, just because I get really nervous and fidgeting and shaky."
"One of the things I find about acting is that the less the audience knows about the actor, the more they're able to believe in him in the role."
"Humbly let go. Let go of trying to do, let go of trying to control, let go of my own way, let go of my own fears. Let God blow His wind, His trials, oxygen for joy's fire. Leave the hand open and be. Be at peace. Bend the knee and be small and let God give what God chooses to give because He only gives love and whisper a surprised thanks. This is the fuel for joy's flame. Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will. And I can empty. I can empty because counting His graces has awakened me to how He cherishes me, holds me, passionately values me. I can empty because I am full of His love. I can trust."
"If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer."
"A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently. A story calls upon us...as individuals-and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind."
"For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."
"However, if we examine the Canadian scene closely enough, we can see signs of this physical and spiritual rot settling into a number of our Canadian urban centres with a troubling spill-over into many of our more rural areas."
"States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one."
"All I know is that every time I go to Africa, I am shaken to my core."
"Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she'd be out on the boardwalk with Jud and Wendy, buying rainbow sorbet from the ice cream shop and placing paper boats into the harbour. She felt like a ghost, drifting past the shell of her own childhood."
"You return and again take the proper course, guided by what? - By the picture in mind of the place you are headed for."
"Working on the themes I was interested in, through the context of a particular family, was a very economical way of dealing with a lot of the issues I was concerned with."
"The United Nations has a lot of capacity on the ground."
"It's heartbreaking but we're trying to get over it. As disappointed as we were, I think that somehow you have to find a way to think that it happened for a reason."
"The counter-argument would be, so what if my sexual relationships are superficial, one can still have satisfying and rewarding relationships with friends, or parents, or siblings, or whatever."
"I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis."
"Our first Prime Minister saw a country that would be known for its generosity of spirit. And so it is."
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