“Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities.”

“Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.”

“Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.”

“There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.”

“The bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.”

“The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.”

“We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.”

“The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.”

“We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.”

“Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.”

“Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.”