Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.
It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.
Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew.
I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.
We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.
Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.
There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.
I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.
We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.
I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.
'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.
The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.
Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.
I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.
One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.
In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that.
The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.
I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.
The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.
I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.
The only accusation of Gillian Triggs with the ring of truth is that she has lost the confidence of the government - but then, so too has Tony Abbott.
I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are.
Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.
In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.
Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.
If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.
A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.
Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.
I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.
Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change.
Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.
I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.
Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.
The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.
Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'
Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.
My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school.
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions.
We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.