Because at bottom, I'm interested in fear, and in courage and cowardice and these are easier to get at through fiction, where you can enter people's heads.

I like a certain grandeur to a landscape, which both the Arctic and coastal BC have. I like it to be at all times clear that people aren't the dominant fact of a particular geography.

Medicine and writing are natural companions.

Storms are sex. They exist alongside and are indifferent to words and description and dissection.

The whole world loves a maverick and the whole world wants the maverick to achieve something nobler than simple rebellion.

I've worked in the Inuit hamlets of the west coast of Hudson Bay since 1994. Over that time I've been very moved by both the pace of social change there -- the loss of traditional ways of seeing the world, the affinity for and comfort with the land -- and by the social disarray that change of this pace produces.

I work on quiet call nights in the hospital, on airplanes and on my sailboat when I have a bit of time -- I cram it into wherever it will fit.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.