Men want to be right. Let them, I say. It drives him crazy when I won’t take the other end of the rope. “Okay, you’re right” are three devastating words.

When these pocket computers started getting common, old people like me catastrophized about how bad it was going to be, but we were wrong. It’s much worse. We’ve been looking at each other’s faces for a million years. But now you don’t see faces anymore. At night on the sidewalks of Toronto people walk around in the dark looking down into tiny lamplit rooms they hold in their hands.

Winter here arrives, stays, persists, goes away a little, then comes back and people start leaping off the bridges. That’s approximately March, when jumping is at its apogee, but even then, winter isn’t over. What it likes to do is go away for a week in April and then return for three days and finish grandpa off.

The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.

Charity should be blind to everything but need. Our personal feelings should not determine whose starvation is legitimate.

I'd fully taken the road many people start on, but most abandon: common sense had given me a miss, and I'd become an artist.

I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.

It's no mistake that the moment of impregnation is called conception: at first, parenthood is nothing more than an idea.

Depression is a surfeit of empathy - a killing empathy - that makes depressives great friends to everyone but themselves. Having a self is a rough business, and depressives can empathize with others who have to deal with it, but not with themselves.

I've always loved Houdini, not just because of what he did, but also because of what he stood for. He was a self-made man in a time when the idea of celebrity was still new, and he used his celebrity for good.