Words matter. These are the best Michael Winter Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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?’
I plan to live to be 98, so I’ll be the guy at Dundas and Yonge flogging a box of mouldy novels.
Linda Svendsen’s ‘Marine Life’ was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.
If I didn’t write sex scenes, all my characters would head to the kitchen and make cups of tea.
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.
Wild and urban at the same time – that’s the type of woman I’m with.
‘Into the Blizzard’ follows the author as he traces the footsteps of the Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War: where they trained in Scotland, where they fought in Gallipoli and where they died at the Battle of the Somme in France.
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.
When you join the army, you are asked to lay down your life for your country. That is a tremendous oath to take. In return, a good country should offer that soldier every possible means it can to allow that soldier to stay alive and, upon return, healthy – both mentally and physically.
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.
If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing – there may just be too much of it.
I’ve grown up, luckily, with only a distant relationship to war and soldiering.
The truth is, everybody falls into an incinerator of some measure or other. Not literally one. The question is what are you going to do with those bad times? Are you just going to let them gnaw at you?
Before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, there was the same sort of talk of young men sacrificing their lives so that a country might grow – that somehow it had been a great nation-building success for Newfoundland.
Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.
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.
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.
How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?
I’ve never in my life categorized a year of my life as good or bad. I just think I’m living a good life, warts and all.
You can’t go wrong with major life and death stories when it comes to a competition, so I thought I’d have a go at writing one.
