The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not "Am I really that oppressed?" but "Am I really that boring?"

More from interview published in the Ontario Review

• All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always approximate.
• Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.
• Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
• Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the blind shadow cast by its absence.
• If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.
• The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.