Ruth Ozeki Quotes

You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living.

Canadian writers don't live in gated mansions; you can just talk to them when you see them lining up at the Second Cup.

At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath?

I like Al Purdy.

Canada has one great novelist (Robertson Davies), which means it has one for every twenty-five million citizens - the world's highest ratio.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Canadians send us great hockey players. You also send us wonderful performers, from the beginning, with Mary Pickford.

Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.

Las Vegas is a beautiful place. I like it more and more and plan to be here often. It's a great place for chess.

I think we're experiencing a resurgence of fantasy-type conventions in general because people want to get out around kindred spirits. Cons are a great place to meet people you've been tweeting and FB'ing with, and since you've had an online relationship with them, it's not like meeting for the first time.

I was never good at scratching, but I was good at collecting old records. Florida was a great place for that, because it's where people go to die.

Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

Running for me has always been a great place to get away. It's a great stress reliever for me. It's great if I need to be working on something in my mind, whether it's things I need to be memorizing or thinking about, or I have some presentation coming up.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

It's a difficult task to deal with cities. But with some original ways of getting things done, with some basic commandments, you can really get cities to be a great, great place to live.

I'm from Canada and my wife is from St. Albans, so I feel a great kinship with the Brits.

New York is the place that made my and other artists' dreams come true by giving us a chance to realise our ideas and concepts. It was a great place for making a presentation of artistic creation.

Television was a great place for me to kind of fall on my face and make mistakes and be okay with it and move on.

We Canadians are not given as a people to great patriotic displays.

A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.

For sure, without question, the writing is better on TV pound for pound than movies because the businesses have changed so much. So all the great writers would rather work for TV, and they do.

I look for strong people. I don't like people who'll say yes to everything I might bring up. I want people who can argue and disagree and have a point of view that's reflected in the magazine. My dad believed in the cult of personality. He brought great writers and columnists to 'The Standard.'

No one can attack you when you're songwriting; it's you and a song, which is a great place to be.

I'm in a great place because I've gone full circle.