There are scenes from books I’m happy with. I tend to think my books are all broken. But then my favourite reads are almost always books that don’t, in the end, pull off what they set out to do. Michael Winter Read Quote
I plan to live to be 98, so I’ll be the guy at Dundas and Yonge flogging a box of mouldy novels. Michael Winter Read Quote
If you look at footage of the Newfoundland Regiment, you see they are at rest and giddy and being silly with one another. Silliness is the antidote to trench warfare. Michael Winter Read Quote
We found letters at the house we bought from a sailor to his wife who lived in the house. He went down to the Caribbean on this trader vessel, bringing down salted fish. There would be handwritten letters, but also telegrams, saying which ports he was in. And he’d be gone for three months. That was just the way it is. Michael Winter Read Quote
To me, the idea that any kind of disaster helps create a nation seems a ridiculous one. There was no family in the house on the land next to me, and there might have been. Michael Winter Read Quote
The fantastic thing about the memorial to the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel is that it’s one of the rare examples where they’ve preserved a battlefield more or less as it was. You can see all the trenches, where the British were, where the Germans lined up. Michael Winter Read Quote
A few years ago, I was trying to buy a piece of land next to a house I had in Newfoundland. I discovered that the plot had been owned by a family, and the son had gone off to World War I and been killed. It began to interest me: What would have happened on that land if the son had lived, had brought up his own family there? Michael Winter Read Quote
The greatness of being an artist is the kind of ridiculous guffaw you can have at one’s own misery. ‘That was miserable! Now how can I write about it?’ Michael Winter Read Quote
Beaumont-Hamel sits within a thousand acres of French agriculture. The trenches are under this blanket of grass. In the 1920s, a park was established here and trees from Newfoundland imported to encircle the battlefield so you get the feeling of being within a copse of woods. Michael Winter Read Quote
Hockey wasn’t invented but discovered. The game, and the large organizing idea behind Stephen Smith’s deeply personal ‘Puckstruck,’ sleeps in ponds and in the crooked limbs of trees overhead; we merely pluck a stick from the sky and skate over the frozen world to find ourselves and each other. Michael Winter Read Quote
