Wayne Grady

“I think of magazines as cultural entities rather than boxes of corn flakes that can be sold and shipped around.”

“In Windsor in the forties, and even up into the fifties and sixties, if you were black, you had to sit in the balcony of the theatres, and you couldn't buy property in most places.”

“I become a first-time novelist and a senior citizen on the same day.”

“America is essentially an entrepreneurial culture: the sizzle is the steak, because, after all, if you buy the sizzle, the steak comes with it. Canada's, in contrast, is a primary-producing culture: we'll buy the steak and hope to get a little sizzle with it. But we know we can't eat sizzle.”

“Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.”

“You can't write anything you want. Once you write that first chapter, then everything else is determined. You can write anything you want, but only one thing works.”