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

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 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.

Medicine and writing are natural companions.

Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost.

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

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.

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.

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.

If we as a society are willing to have a preference for organic food, the farmer can pass on the savings.

I am a composer, horn player, and computer programmer.

I do as much debugging as possible on the Mac, but I occasionally must debug problems in the PC world, which is significantly slower.

In an organic system you don't waste anything. We need to educate the consumer to accept a tiny blemish on an orange.

Although Patterson Beams was not my first plug-in, I knew from the beginning that I would write it, because the single biggest time consuming factor for me was editing each beam manually.

But with carefully chosen keyboard macros to activate it, Mass Copy is quick, convenient, and powerful. Most users who have mastered it depend heavily on it. That certainly includes me.

Here, we tell the story: why the people came here, what they did when they got here, going back to the Native Americans and coming all the way forward.

It's more than just high quality food for the family table; it's growing the food in a way that does not harm the environment. That gives me emotional well-being that is important to me.

Perhaps the most versatile and useful plug-in in the collection is Mass Copy. It is certainly the one I use the most. Due to limitations in how plugins can interact with Finale, Mass Copy has a somewhat unusual user interface.

Suprisingly, one of the most complex pieces of code is the code to determine where a note is in the staff. Finale stores notes as relative scale positions in the current key.