A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

The dog is a Yes-animal, very popular with people who can’t afford to keep a Yes-man.

If you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man’s speech with other men’s jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

When you’re a novelist, you’re writing a play but you’re acting all the parts, you’re controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it’s your show.

Happiness . . . is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

I WISH PEOPLE WEREN’T SO SET ON BEING THEMSELVES, WHEN THAT MEANS BEING A BASTARD.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.

Readers of biographies like their meat rare.