Quotes from Michael Redhill

I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.

It's no mistake that the moment of impregnation is called conception: at first, parenthood is nothing more than an idea.

Sufferers of depression have 'episodes' the same way those who suffer from multiple sclerosis do. It comes, wipes the floor with you, and then somehow returns you to the world. But it comes back.

The reason so many intelligent and creative people suffer from depression is that when you take the risk of being fully conscious, you open Pandora's box, and you can't close it again.

No one is depressed when they're asleep, which is why being in bed is such a safe place if you're really down.

Depression is a surfeit of empathy - a killing empathy - that makes depressives great friends to everyone but themselves. Having a self is a rough business, and depressives can empathize with others who have to deal with it, but not with themselves.

We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.

I'd fully taken the road many people start on, but most abandon: common sense had given me a miss, and I'd become an artist.

I found that through my life, living in the city of Toronto, I look above the Pizza Pizza sign, and I look above the other signs and window dressing, and I see evidence of a city that no longer exists in the keystones and the decorations that line the tops of buildings. That presence of the old city has always moved me.

The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.

Like a lot of people, I've often wondered what else I might have been. When I was younger, but even after I was a child, I thought Batman was the whole package. Smart, calculating, pragmatic. Depressed, but in a way women found hot. Tragic at his core and struggling with his demons while trying to save the world.

Having a child is sowing the seeds of your own obsolescence: birth is the fuse that leads to that other thing. You appear, you replace yourself, you die.

I wasn't against becoming a dad: I'd had a good childhood, as childhoods go, and as role models, my imperfect parents were as good as or better than most.

I've always loved Houdini, not just because of what he did, but also because of what he stood for. He was a self-made man in a time when the idea of celebrity was still new, and he used his celebrity for good.

I have a strange habit of walking down streets and staring up, rather than looking at shopfronts and stuff like that.

Charity should be blind to everything but need. Our personal feelings should not determine whose starvation is legitimate.

When these pocket computers started getting common, old people like me catastrophized about how bad it was going to be, but we were wrong. It's much worse. We've been looking at each other's faces for a million years. But now you don't see faces anymore. At night on the sidewalks of Toronto people walk around in the dark looking down into tiny lamplit rooms they hold in their hands.

Men want to be right. Let them, I say. It drives him crazy when I won't take the other end of the rope. "Okay, you're right" are three devastating words.

Winter here arrives, stays, persists, goes away a little, then comes back and people start leaping off the bridges. That's approximately March, when jumping is at its apogee, but even then, winter isn't over. What it likes to do is go away for a week in April and then return for three days and finish grandpa off.

Stop it. I'm sure she looks more like herself than she looks like me." "No, no. You must come see now. She buys my pupusas!" "Your what?" "My pupusas!" "Katerina—" "Jean?

How are you!" Katerina came around her counter to hug me. I stiffened in her embrace. "Are you okay? I worried about you, you know." "About me?" "Of course! Come in the back, I make a coffee." She ushered me toward the rear of the food mall more quickly than necessary, I thought.

I do my own habitual scan. I've already completed mental check-offs of the drunks, the painfully pierced, and there have been two iced coffees and a couple sharing a starfruit. Miriam is back in her spot. I go over and ask her, "If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?

If you see Ingrid, don't look at her. Walk the other way." I give him a two-dollar coin and he returns to the background, like he's part of an endless line of characters provided by a talent agency.

Someone's hand clamps down on my shoulder and it's one of the men trimming the vegetables on Baldwin Street. He wears a white apron stained with dirt and smears of green and red. "Go from here," he says to me.