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" Every year, the Giller jury is different. You write the best book you can and throw it out there. "

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" That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath. "

" I was a big reader of Zane Grey as a young boy, and so horses and the West figured large in my imagination. "

" I usually submit a novel at a certain number of words, and when I've finished working with my editor, the novel is longer than when I submitted it. I need my editor to help me open up the story. "

" I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one. "

" The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old. "

" What fascinates me as a writer is the stuff underneath, To me, what drives a novel is the curiosity behind the character and the depths that you want to find in that character. "

" In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story. "

" As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response. "

" It took me ten years to write a proper story. I floundered about trying to shape something, counting on the 'feeling' I had as I wrote, only to discover upon rereading my work that the feeling had disappeared, and what remained was an empty shell. "

" In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way. "

" I think a construction project for me is like writing a novel. I can't do the project unless I can envision sort of the whole structure and see what the end result might be. "

" I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels. "

" A mentor, a 'teacher,' is like an editor. I absolutely value my editor, who is my teacher. "

" Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock. "

" I like characters who are contradictory. "

" You are only as good as your last book, and so there has to be a book. "

" Though I loved books as a young boy, I loved sports even more. I wanted to be a quarterback in the CFL. "

" As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there. "

" The IMPAC is a terribly important award. "

" I may not have written the stories that I've written if I hadn't ended up in Niverville. I don't know; I don't know. How can you know? "

" I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book. "

" Failure is essential. Trial and error is necessary. "

" One day, at my office, I wrote down some names and dates and notes, and I wrote a title, 'The Age of Despair,' and then some other 'Ages' - Innocence, God, Reason, Hope - and I wrote this as well: 'Woman, born in 1930, lives till the age of 80 or so, suffers depression, marries a car dealer, has children who grow up to confuse her.' "

" Books in general are great, but I'm a fiction lover, and I will continue to do it. "

" An editor is an accomplice, looking in from the outside. That objective view is essential. We don't write in a vacuum, and we don't publish in a vacuum. "

" At the age of twenty, having published nothing and having had little guidance in my reading, I decided that I wanted to write. "

" When I get moved to write a story, I don't question the story. I dive right in, and I try to ignore the voices that are chattering away at me: 'You can't do that', 'You shouldn't do that'. I just sort of leap and take a chance and go for it. "

" I think my writing was certainly shaped from having lived in a place like Niverville as well as by the family that I came from, the religion that I had, that type of thing. "

" For me, when I 'discover' a story, there is a feeling of buoyancy and clarity, perhaps similar to early morning out on a prairie highway, when darkness lifts and reveals the outline of farmhouses and copses of trees in the distance. "