Wherever I Travel I'm Too Late. The

In, 1950, At The Age, 19 I Dropped Out Of St. George William College In Montreal, As It Then Was, And Sailed For England On The Franconia. Foolishly, No Arrogantly, Believing I Could Put Canada And Its Picayune Problems Behind Me, Never Dreaming It Would Become The Raw Material Of Most Of My Fiction And Non-fiction. Or That I Would Care So Deeply About Its Surviving Intact.

Well, When I Was A Young Writer The People We Read Were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And To Begin With, I Was A Bit Of A Copycat Writer And Very Derivative And Tried To Write A Novel Using Their Voices, Really.... I Keep It Out Of Print.

There Are Ten Commandments, Right? Well, It's Like An Exam. You Get Eight Out Of Ten, You're Just About Top Of The Class.

I Don't Hold With Shamans, Witch Doctors, Or Psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Or Even Dickens, Understood More About The Human Condition Than Ever Occurred To Any Of You. You Overrated Bunch Of Charlatans Deal With The Grammar Of Human Problems, And The Writers I've Mentioned With The Essence.

Well, People Have Been Wondering What's Going To Happen To The Novel For Two Hundred Years; Its Death Has Been Announced Many Times. You Know, I Think The Novel Keeps Redefining The World We Live In. What You Should Look For In A Novel Is A Window Nobody Else Is Looking Out Of, That Nobody Else Can Look Through. What You Look For Is A Voice. You Pick Up A Novel By Someone Such As Faulkner Or Hemingway And You Just Read Three Pages And You Know Who Wrote It. And That's What One Should Demand Of A Novelist.