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" I just have to trust that the story is going to shake out in such a way that's going to be palatable to readers. "

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" Here it is, 2011, and I feel zero shame when I tell you I would like to marry my smartphone. It is a handful of pure delight. "

" I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance. "

" We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren't enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase - long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative. "

" I went into the world confident my tea training would open many doors. And I did particularly well with the Irish and fellow Nova Scotians over 60. But this only got me so far. It took a long time to cultivate the tricks of easy social interaction. "

" I've always been a sucker for any technology engineered primarily for the entertainment of the human race - even such technology as has been disguised as 'useful' or 'improving' when we all know the real virtue lies in its ability to distract and divert. "

" No one expects the doormat to stand upright, shake itself off, and amble down the street to seek its own happiness. "

" When you're not sure your anger is justified, the thing to do is ask yourself exactly where it's coming from. "

" Anger is one of those emotions that doesn't follow the letter of the law. It speaks before it thinks. It rears up on its hind legs and charges. "

" Never use dogs to symbolize anything. That is ridiculous. Always ensure that any dogs are just dogs; i.e., characters in the story who happen to be dogs. "

" As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation. "

" I started out in the journalism program, but I got kicked out. I wasn't very good at it. It wasn't where I wanted to be ultimately. "

" Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next. "

" The creative process taps into our deepest subconscious, and we are each of us sex-crazed - products of a shame-based Judeo-Christian culture that has irrevocably warped us all to varying degrees. "

" Now, as a writer, the whole world is your nail polish display, and what's more, you can help yourself. A thrilling, colourful array of gorgeous human peculiarity revolves before your eyes, and you still can't quite believe it's all yours for the taking. "

" There was a time when I thought dudes had friendship all figured out. The focus on eating things in front of giant screens, pretending to punch one another, competing over who can utter the grossest and most profane personal insults imaginable - this struck me as the very apex of human social exchange. "

" I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing. "

" I come from a working-class background, and I thought I had to be studying something that would get me a job. "

" Keep a copy of 'Islands in the Stream' by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald's 'The Crack Up' on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes. "

" Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality. "

" To buy dinner transmits that you feel time spent in your date's company has been a pleasure and a privilege. "

" I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms. "

" I should say I am not much of a gamer - anymore. The reason for this is that I have to make a living, and my body requires vitamin D, and I've come to value the heady pleasures of human interaction over the temporary exhilaration of reaching the 'next level.' "

" Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game. "

" Occasionally, chewing over some random letter writer's dilemma, I'll find myself imagining scenarios where the problem could be sidestepped by an innocent fib or series of evasive manoeuvres. Then, I slap myself on the wrist. "

" I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place. "

" You can catch a scent in the wind - an idea, or a concept - and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can't when you're writing a novel. "

" A novelist's sense that he or she is 'above' a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form. "

" We allow ourselves to unclench when we're home with our families, which is one of the truly wonderful advantages of human intimacy. "

" My dad was a real man's man, and so were my brothers, in a small town where hockey is king. It's a masculine culture. It made me really attentive to what it meant to be a guy. "

" When a man tells a woman there is no chance of a formal, committed, long-term relationship, the only self-respecting response is to take him at his word and move on. "