The reader cannot create; that has been done for him by the author. Th — Robertson Davies

"A pig can learn more tricks than a dog, but has too much sense to want to do it."

"Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather."

"When John Ryder, for instance, writes "I utter valediction to the author of my being," he means simply that he said goodbye to his mother."

"Principally I played pedants, idiots, old fathers, and drunkards. As you see, I had a narrow escape from becoming a professor."

"If you can, and if you are a playgoer and a filmgoer, you should be able to find voices for all the characters in the books you read."

"When the time came for Pompadour herself to die, she confessed, was given her viaticum, and was from that time forth forbidden to see her lover. And when her body was borne away from Versailles, Louis was thought to have behaved rather badly because he watched the sad procession from a balcony. Let no one suppose that these people lived lives that were any more free from religious and neighbourly censure than the adulterers in our smallest Canadian villages. Even wealth and privilege could not wholly insulate them from that frost."