Michael Winter Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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 grown up, luckily, with only a distant relationship to war and soldiering.

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.

I approached writing a story for the CBC Literary Awards as a mercenary venture – $5,000 for one story, not bad. Now, how do you win it? Jurors are wading through skyscrapers of paper, looking for one story that stands out.

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.

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.

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?’

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.

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?

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.

If I didn’t write sex scenes, all my characters would head to the kitchen and make cups of tea.