Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.
What reality was ever made by realists?
I think writing should be about change.
I do not come out of a literary tradition.
Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.
I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.
A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.
I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love.
The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.
A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.
I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.
Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.
An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.
Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.
Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.
In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.
I'm afraid a lot of people have lost a lot of money over the years betting on me.
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.
Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.
Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.
There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.
The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.
The monsters demand less of you as a writer because they're probably closer to who you are.
It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.
Film is the art of turning money into light, and light into money. But it begins with money.
The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.
There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.
What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.
I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.
Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.
I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.
A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.
The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.