It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

This is odd, but there are certain things that are really embarrassing to talk about - one is my job and the success that I've had in it, and the other is money.

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

My faith guides my life.

I don't stand for the black man's side, I don' t stand for the white man's side. I stand for God's side.

One time, I came off stage and a guy named Roman Decare, God rest his soul, he was a comic. 'Louie, if you do that family stuff, and you're a clean comic on stage, you'll become famous.' And, for some reason, a switch clicked, and I started doing the family stuff, and it became a giant part of my life.

My parents and I - I'm an only child - are not particularly religious, but I was christened and raised in that vague and characteristically Canadian form of Protestantism known as the United Church.