Novelists From Canada

"I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you.""

"A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become."

"Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."

"Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what’s in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt."

"There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever — money, for instance, or war."

"All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac."

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."

"For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it."

"Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing — a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U.N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized.""

"A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice."

"Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for."

"No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection."

"Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything."

"I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag."

"Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology."

"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."

"I think that New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture."

"We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals."

"We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it — the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it."

"All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!"

"Conquered people tend to be witty."

"There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."

"Women tell men things that men are not very likely to find out for themselves."

"Famous author (and former newspaperman) Robertson Davies recently gave a reading from his latest novel to a packed library theatre in Calgary. After the reading, he took questions from the audience. One young man asked, "Professor Davies, how can a practicing journalist find time to write fiction?" "Oh dear," Davies replied, "that question shows a great deal of innocence about journalism.""

"I literally never meet anybody who ever talks about God as something other than a kind of big man. I think God is a wondrous spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, but only interested in men as part of a giant creation which is pulsing with life. People say, when a relative dies: "Oh, how could God have taken her away so young and with so much before her?" God doesn't give a bugger about how young she is. He probably isn't noticing particularly. That's just the way a lot of things happen. A lot gets spilled, you know, in nature. When you look at what's going on out there now, those trees are dropping seeds by literally the hundreds of thousands and millions, and one or two of them may take on. I think that that is the way that God functions. He doesn't care nearly as much about individuals and individual fates as we would like to suppose. But by trying to ally ourselves with the totality of things, we may get into Tao as they say in the East and be part of it, really take part in it, and not just regard ourselves as a kind of miraculous creation and the rest just sort of stage scenery against which we perform."

"We are Brigand Philosophers Our hearts are high and cheery, For we know our robbery rests upon A sound economic theory!"

"The brigand's life is a very fine life For men of generous mind; We rob the rich to help the poor And succour oppressed mankind. The rich, dear souls, are close around And it's easy work to skelp 'em; But the poor — damn their eyes — can never be found When we're in the mood to help them."

"Love, though sweet, must know its proper station And never seek to rival education."

"They live and laugh who know the better part — Count length of pleasure not by dial or glass But by the heart; What are our fears When Time's slow footfall, fall, fall Falling Turns lovers' hours to years?"

"He sets a thief to guard his purse Who trusts a dial with his hours Or bids a sand-glass bleed away his nights, His days, his loves, his pleasures and his powers. The burthen of his years Is Time's soft footfall, Time's soft Falling Through his joys and tears."

"He was born into, and seems never to have questioned, that English "class system" which has been so much abused in the present century. Indeed, several governments have announced their intention of abolishing it, and the most recent prime minister to retire showed her egalitarian principles by accepting the title of Baroness Thatcher."

"Those of you who have visited Oxford know what a busy, crowded, noisy place it now is and you might perhaps not guess that it was a university town if it were not that, now and then, the traffic is halted while the Vice-Chancellor, preceded by his two mace-bearers, crosses the street. It must be one of the few places left in the world where self-assertion, covetousness, and the whole world of the combustion engine must come to a halt because somebody distinguished for his intelligence is going about his business."

"Try some Symbolic Logic on your little Couch Potato when you go home, and see what happens."

"Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection."

"The really great eccentrics are all inimitable; they are not possessed by a single oddity; they are, in their deepest selves, unlike the generality of mankind."

"Can you tell me the time of the last complete show?" "You have the wrong number." "Eh? Isn't this the Odeon?" I decide to give a Burtonian answer. "No, this is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night."

"The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness."

"But what ailed Little Eva St. Clair, in Uncle Tom's Cabin? What carried off Little Nell?...They have no clear symptoms, and seem to die of Ingrowing Virtue."

"A Library goes on as far as thought can reach."

"The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live."

"Naked anger may sometimes be seen in priests of the Church of Rome, but the Church of England prefers the icy smile, the false bonhomie, the sword concealed in the palm-branch."

"Art is always at peril in universities, where there are so many people, young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew."

"The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement."

"When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle."

"I knew that he prayed a great deal, of course for help in the examinations. But subsequent clinical experience has convinced me that God is not particularly interested in examinations, just as he won't be dragged into the Stock Market, or being a backer in show business."

"Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant."

"Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit."

"Perhaps the word for the feeling I mean is serenity, a high acceptance, a recognition that Heracleitus's doctrine of eternal flow is a great truth, and while we may not, in ourselves, find the moment when the one element changes into the other, that moment will come and the consciousness of its inevitability may give us courage in adversity, and balance in good fortune."

"The people who fear humour — and they are many — are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities."

"No, the Golden Mean is not a sunny, untroubled nullity, but a deep awareness of possibilities, with one eye cocked toward Comedy and the other eye skewed toward Tragedy, and out of this feat of balanced observation emerges Humour, not as a foolish amusement or an escape from reality, but as a breadth of perception, and what Heracleitus called "an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre". A reconciliation of opposites, indeed."