43 quotes found
Novelist · Australian
Australian novelist
“A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.”
“A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one m...”
“For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations i...”
“... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.”
“Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as its seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I dont...”
“After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and r...”
“Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.”
“The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.”
“The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers ...”
“He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more than the reading of poet...”
“Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.”
“In Australia the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didnt expect to end up with the chicken.”
“A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.”
“'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.”
“I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its l...”
“Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.”
“In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.”
“The most important thing is our dignity. If we have that we can survive on bread and water.”
“A good book...leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.”
“There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.”
