Quotes
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.
In most English school it is a brutal kind of pro-sporty spirit that militates against the intellectual who is looked on as a weakling.
If you think of the Greek city-states where they developed all the ideas of democracy, if you think of the medieval cities where the serf could flee from his lord's estate, once he got through the gates he was a free man.
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.
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 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 suppose, a person for whom freedom is the most important thing - intellectual freedom and, as far as possible, physical freedom.
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 remember people who tagged along a bit and our world was full of contempt and fury against them. I used to tolerate them because I thought they were benighted soulsbut Orwell didn't. He just hated them with a bitter fury.
I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.
I don't have all that many friends who are writers. I know their problems, but I don't know the problems of painters.
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 believe in that connection between freedom and the city.
I began even as a boy to realize how wide the world can be for a man of free intelligence.
Earle Birney, yes. Earle that was an odd sort of relationship, stormy at the time, very stormy. Earle was a very bad-tempered man and a vain man, but nevertheless.
Yeah, one thing I had a go on that I wasn't very happy with was violin because I was used to playing a cello. It's a different action . It's like marching and chewing gum at the same time. It's weird.
When we were first started we were doing a lot of Motown stuff, but actually playing it more in a rock way. Everybody in the band sang and we did a lot of harmonies.
When we were doing songs like 'Sounds Of Silence,' this is when myself and Carl Wayne were having a few problems. He didn't want to sing my songs . So I let him choose songs that he'd like to sing and he came up with some of those. I didn't always agree with that because to me it sounded too cabaret.
When we did the program I started rolling around the floor and biting the neck off my guitar and all that as you do. To begin with I didn't feel comfortable doing it but I had a few large vodkas before I went on so I was all right. We had a great reaction from that. Up until the breakup of the Move that was the image that we portrayed.
When we did a lot of that Motown stuff there were four of us on the front line. When we started the evening we'd start from one end of the band and just go along. The lead singer would change all the time. That's the first time that I actually managed to put it into a record.