Novelist Quotes

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

You know, so I was a weird eccentric kid but I did believe in the power of the word and of the word being made flesh I suppose, which again I suppose came from my temperament as well as my upbringing.

Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular.

Thomas was my true name but everyone knew me as Mick, except my mother, who knew me as definitely Michael.

So nonetheless given the importance that was placed on sport in Australia, I wanted to be part of that scene, particularly since I had felt very strongly in my early schooling being marginalised even in the Catholic school.

So I was very close to ordination. I was delighted to be ordained a deacon, which is the last step between, before becoming a priest. But then it all fell apart.

So I remember both medicine, because I frequently sick, particularly with asthma for which there was no proper treatment then, and in religion I had a strong sense of there being a patriarchy.

My brother arrived some months after my father left. Um, and he ah, was thus eight years younger than me and it was um, you know, it was such a time that my mother probably had people wondering was it his.

In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.

I was never any good at cricket thought I love it as a, as a sort of mystery.

I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did.

I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.

But in practice Australia - the pluralism of Australia - sorry the sectarianism to an extent stopped at the time you took your uniform off after coming home from school.

But I was also a brat. I used to belong to a gang that went looking for fights with other gangs.

Australia integrated the - brought on the ships and unleashed in the society the dogs of sectarianism, which had existed in other places - in Glasgow, in Liverpool and of course in Ireland, north and south.

And so um, I knew that I really didn't want to be a priest and didn't want to be a celibate, though I could probably manage it. Um, and um, ultimately I left.

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

And I was very interested in the priesthood.