I'm World-famous ... All Over Canada.

I Work Every Day - Or At Least I Force Myself Into Office Or Room. I May Get Nothing Done, But You Don't Earn Bonuses Without Putting In Time. Nothing May Come For Three Months, But You Don't Earn The Fourth Without It.

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.

For The Record, Pot, Like The Reader's Digest , Is Not Necessarily Habit-forming, But Both Can Lead To Hard-core Addiction : Heroin, In One Case, Abridged Bad Books, In The Other. Either Way You Look At It, A Withdrawal From A Meaningful Life.

Well, People Have Been Wondering What's Going To Happen To The Novel For Two Hundred Years; Its Death Has Been Announced Many Times. You Know, I Think The Novel Keeps Redefining The World We Live In. What You Should Look For In A Novel Is A Window Nobody Else Is Looking Out Of, That Nobody Else Can Look Through. What You Look For Is A Voice. You Pick Up A Novel By Someone Such As Faulkner Or Hemingway And You Just Read Three Pages And You Know Who Wrote It. And That's What One Should Demand Of A Novelist.

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.