The Canadian Kid Who Wants To Grow

A Novel May Take Anywhere From Two To Five Years To Write And, In The End, You Might Manage A Couple Of Thousand Dollars On It, No More.

Canada Is One Of The Few Places Left Where The Small Decencies Are Observed. If, As A Young Man, I Was Scornful Of The Country Because We Always Seemed So Far Behind Style-setting New York, I Now Thank God For The Cultural Lag. Ours, After All, Is The Good Neighbourhood. A Society Well Worth Preserving.

If You Don't Count Some Of Jehovah's Injunctions, There Are No Humorists In The Bible.

It Is No More Expected Of Most Producers To Read A Book Than It Is, Say, Of Ted Williams To Dust Off Home Plate.

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.