The Canadian Kid Who Wants To Grow

Well, When I Was A Young Writer The People We Read Were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And To Begin With, I Was A Bit Of A Copycat Writer And Very Derivative And Tried To Write A Novel Using Their Voices, Really.... I Keep It Out Of Print.

When A Child Is Born, I Once Explained To The Kids, Some Dads Lay Down Bottles Of Wine For Them That Will Mature When They Grow Up Into Ungrateful Adults. Instead, What You're Going To Get From Me, As Each Of You Turns Sixteen, Is A Library Of The One Hundred Books That Gave Me The Most Pleasure When I Was A Know-nothing Adolescent.

This Is An Age Of Scientific Wonders. You Miss Somebody So You Pick Up The Phone To Say Hello. Three Minutes For Sixty-five Cents. Nobody Goes Broke.

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.

There Are Ten Commandments, Right? Well, It's Like An Exam. You Get Eight Out Of Ten, You're Just About Top Of The Class.