“That's what I love about the short story. You are naked on the page. There is nowhere to hide.”

“The movie I was working on, "Cleopatra", it's about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that's what every story is about.”

“Well, this is a story about books."About books?"About accursed books, about a man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of anovel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind."You talk like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel."That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story.”

“I think about how much of a good story seems to happen elsewhere, off the canvas or screen or page, in Europe or a backwater New Brunswick town, in what is left unsaid. A word on the tip of the tongue, ungraspable. The teasing smush of a feather boa over naked breasts in a striptease.”

“At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day.Then I knew what the problem was.I needed experience.How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?”

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”