Date of birth: 1912-05-08
Date of death: 1995-01-28
Quotes number: 18
Nationality: Canadian
Profession: Writer
I began even as a boy to realize how wide the world can be for a man of free intelligence.
I believe in that connection between freedom and the city.
I don't believe in kicking away ladders. By that, I mean the ladders by which I ascended as a young writer, small magazines that didn't pay anything, and that sort of thing.
I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.
I suppose I'm led to do so by the fact of what happened to my contemporaries - people whom I've admired, people who I thought were ten times better than me when I was in my twenties and early thirties. I may have been right.
I was allowed to wander where I could. Here is a case in which you search for your independence and allow something creative to come out of that.
I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary.
I was unpopular at school just because I was an intellectual. I always answered all the questions off the top of my head but they nevertheless resented because of that.
It doesn't really mean a great deal of difference to a life. You live as you wish to do and if a job is oppressing, you leave it. I've done it on several occasions.
It even has the same phraseology as the English orders of knighthood, companions and this sort of thing.
