We Do Not Live In A Centred

One Of The Most Obvious Uses Of Literature, I Think, Is Its Encouragement Of Tolerance... Bigots And Fanatics Seldom Have Any Use For The Arts, Because They're So Preoccupied With Their Beliefs And Actions That They Can't See Them Also As Possibilities.

It Seems To Me That Canadian Sensibility Has Been Profoundly Disturbed, Not So Much By Our Famous Problem Of Identity, Important As That Is, As By A Series Of Paradoxes In What Confronts That Identity. It Is Less Perplexed By The Question "who Am I?" Than By Some Such Riddle As "where Is Here?

The Bedrock Of Doubt Is The Total Nothingness Of Death. Death Is A Leveler, Not Because Everybody Dies, But Because Nobody Understands What Death Means.

We Have To Look At The Figures Of Speech A Writer Uses, His Images And Symbols, To Realize That Underneath All The Complexity Of Human Life That Uneasy Stare At An Alien Nature Is Still Haunting Us, And The Problem Of Surmounting It Still With Us.

Poetry Is The Most Direct And Simple Means Of Expressing Oneself In Words: The Most Primitive Nations Have Poetry, But Only Quitewell Developed Civilizations Can Produce Good Prose. So Don't Think Of Poetry As A Perverse And Unnatural Way Of Distorting Ordinary Prose Statements: Prose Is A Much Less Natural Way Of Speaking Than Poetry Is. If You Listen To Small Children, And To The Amount Of Chanting And Singsong In Their Speech, You'll See What I Mean.