Each Man Creates God In His Own

In, 1950, At The Age, 19 I Dropped Out Of St. George William College In Montreal, As It Then Was, And Sailed For England On The Franconia. Foolishly, No Arrogantly, Believing I Could Put Canada And Its Picayune Problems Behind Me, Never Dreaming It Would Become The Raw Material Of Most Of My Fiction And Non-fiction. Or That I Would Care So Deeply About Its Surviving Intact.

Listen Your Lordship, I'm A Respecter Of Institutions. Even In Paris, I Remained A Canadian. I Puffed Hashish, But I Didn't Inhale.

I Had, Like Any Other Young Novelist, Started Out By Believing The Difficult Thing Was To Get Published And That, Once You Managed That, Well, Your Financial Problems Were Over. I Discovered, Like Any Other Serious Novelist, That Actually They Had Only Just Begun.

Fundamentally, All Writing Is About The Same Thing; It's About Dying, About The Brief Flicker Of Time We Have Here, And The Frustration That It Creates.

Actually, When It Comes To Knocking The Canadian Cultural Scene, Nobody Outdoes Canadians, Myself Included. We Are Veritable Masters Of Self-deprecation.