You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.
If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?
Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.
If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.
It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.
Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it.
In the future, IKEA will become an ever more spiritual sanctuary. In the future, your dream life will increasingly look like Google street view. Everyone will be feeling the same way as you, and there's some comfort to be found there.
You can never become rich unless you like rich people.
Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.
If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.
There's nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.
I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of.
People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.
I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.
In our heads we're all about 33 years old.
'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.
When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?
Quick. Name ten dead redheads.
Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.
Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.
I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M.
Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.
I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder.
Those Catholics, they really nab you when you're young. They sear you. They sear you; they do.
I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country.
It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.
The one thing about my life that's different from others is that I wake up for no one, and for some reason, that's just good for your creativity.
No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies.
I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away.
My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, 'Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.' And your parents are like: 'O.K., I'll quit my job. We'll move to an Alpine community.'
I have to say, 'Pod' was a bon-bon, a treat to myself. A treat to write: a happy, pleasurable write.
For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.
If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.
Headwise, I always kind of knew that everyone goes grey in our family very early - and I was like, it works for me. I started growing my beard, and it changes the shape of your skull and your face, and I started seeing my mother's side of the family in myself for the first time.
I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career, and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice. Well, what can you do about it? Next.
If I don't learn something new every year, I go crazy.