[with Graeme Gibson, on the death of Farley Mowat] Farley was a great and iconic Canadian who understood our environmental problems decades before others did. He loved this country with a passion and threw himself into the fray in wartime as well - also with a passion.

Publication on social media is in part a performance, as is everything 'social' that human beings do; but what happens when that brightly lit arena expands so much that there is no green room in which the mascara can be removed, no cluttered, imperfect backstage where we can be 'ourselves'? What happens to us if we must be 'on' all the time? Then we're in the twenty-four-hour glare of the supervised prison. To live entirely in public is a form of solitary confinement.

Plague has hung over human history. The biggest human extinction was after 1492 in North and South America when the mortality rate was ninety- five per cent, which is enormous. But again, I'm giving you grounds for optimism: there were enough to continue. The five per cent who made it through are what you need to survive a bottleneck.

On writing: If I waited for perfection...I would never write a word.

Om growth: Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee...I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

On childhood: Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.