Australian Quotes

Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league.

My father was very much a handy person round the house, and I learnt a lot of carpentry from him.

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.

What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?'

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.

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.

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.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

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 true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

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 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.

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 never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

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 have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.

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.

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

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.

It is better to be defeated on principle than to win on lies.

Whether you're a mechanic or you build houses or you work in an office, you don't have to like your boss.

They knew who I was in Australia in 2006, but not to a great extent. Now, with the momentum of a second World Cup, it has gone crazy.

No money in this world could convince me to play for Liverpool. That's not a lack of respect for Liverpool supporters or the football club. It's respect for the Everton supporters. You just can't do that. It goes against everything that I stand for. No chance.

It's a massive compliment to me to be known in Asia because Asia is the way forward in football, along with the Middle East. I believe that strongly.

If kids see you on the street and they want an autograph, that's a big honour so I spend half an hour before I get in the ground and 40 minutes to an hour after the game with the Everton fans signing autographs.