Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Swimming always cleans your soul
Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.
At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.
I always pity people who have to write my plot synopses.
All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.
Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way.
People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else
It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.
I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.
Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.
I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.
You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.
Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.
I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.
I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life.
Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.
I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher - well, that's a tautology - a country schoolteacher.
When I finished 'True History of the Kelly Gang,' I realised that Faulkner had not lost his power over me.
I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.
My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education.
I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all - even if it does continue to terrify me.
The Australian cast of mind is not something I would want to be without - and I couldn't be without. It's not a choice.
The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.
I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window.
I think there was, and there is, a real Commonwealth culture. It's different. America doesn't really feel to be a part of that.
I was very anxious when I was writing 'Oscar And Lucinda.' I would take other books off the shelf to check my chapter length was OK.
I don't need new boots I got bluchers back down home. Eff the effing bluchers I'll buy you new adjectival effing elastic sided boots.
When I was young and easily outraged, I would be upset when every fictional character I created was somehow reduced to 'autobiography.'
My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.
It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.
Writers are always envious, mean-minded, filled with rage and envyat other's good fortune. There is nothing like the failure of a close friend to cheer us up.
One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.
The failure of the U.S.'s foreign adventures often seems to have its roots in the U.S.'s total ignorance of things on the ground, of the countries that they fiddle with.
I'm someone who always wants to do everything differently. If I have a pattern, I'd rather I didn't have a pattern. I want every book to be unpredictable and new. Damn it!
I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.
I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.
And it's always possible that you will not get a nice review. So - and that's enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can't talk back, and it's sort of shaming in a way.
I like how they are. I think they're great. And their communities are communities. I have a greater sense of community in New York than almost anywhere I've ever lived. Really, it's terrific.
I woke up in Australia almost every day for the first 47 years of my life. When I left, I didn't discard that, didn't reject that, didn't forget that. Not even New York City can wipe that out.
I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing, I was always supporting myself. That's the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression.
So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.
I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.
I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.
I used to say when I was younger, 'I'm exhausted; writers can only write for four hours a day and that's done.' Now I find, as I'm getting older and I'm more aware of time, I can actually write all day.
I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn't understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people.
If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.
The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.