Farley Mowat Quotations

I write better in Cape Breton... too many people around in Ontario. Down there I meet all sorts of non-human people, but they don't bother me, and I don't feel I have to apologize on behalf of my species quite so often.

We're under some gross misconception that we're a good species, going somewhere important, and that at the last minute we'll correct our errors and God will smile on us. It's delusion.

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

Without a function, we cease to be. So, I will write till I die.

Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.

You never know when the devil might come calling.

I believe in God the way my dog does

I have to go on writing because I wouldn't be able to go on without writing. It is the only function that works for me, and without that function, I would die.

Don't let the facts interfere with the truth.

Mutt enjoyed traveling by car, but he was an unquiet passenger. He suffered from the delusion, common to dogs and small boys, that when he was looking out the right-hand side, he was probably missing something far more interesting on the left-hand side.

I never let the facts get in the way of the truth!

If you are going to be a big personality, you've got to have some kind of characteristic gimmick.

It is in our nature to travel into our past, hoping thereby to illuminate the darkness that bedevils the present.

On my 70th birthday, I was asked how I felt about mankind's prospects. This is my reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer's vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts, we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike the yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be?

Ah me son, we don't be takin' nothin' from the sea. We has to sneak up on what we wants and wiggle it away

After all, we fought the Yanks in 1812 and kicked them the hell out of our country - but not with blanks.

And this is what happened, ands this is why the caribou and the wolf are one; for the caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong.

Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions...

Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destory; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification.

The wolf never kills for fun, which is probably one of the main differences distinguishing him from man.

Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace.

We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be –the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself.

Stephen Harper is probably the most dangerous human being ever elevated to power in Canada.