Australian Quotes

I don't blame my own parents for the way I grew up, as quite often there is little choice in these issues.

I believe the divine is part of the world, not in a pantheistic way but by way of the movement of the Spirit.

I believe that the quantum of our knowledge will increase considerably in the coming years and that scientists will continue to be amongst the brave voices speaking out.

Climate change is such a huge issue that it requires strong, concerted, consistent and enduring action by governments.

Climate change is also clearly a matter of huge interest and concern for the scientific community.

As far as performance, the roar of the crowd, the smell of the greasepaint no I don't feel that.

And living in Australia I am relatively well off.

And given that there's been probably a ten-fold amount of information about terrorism through the media than there has about climate change; I think that's quite an interesting statistic.

You don't want to spend your life explaining yourself.

At an everyday level I would reckon myself more than fortunate.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.

We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.

The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

I think writers are very anxious.

I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.

But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.

At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.

I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

Well it's hard to remember who, but I drunk dial a lot.

They think my life is glamourous. It's not true. I obviously get to come in and do radio interviews. That's the glamour. But other than that, I eat and sleep and that's it. Eat, sleep and do shows.