Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.
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 more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes.
Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises
-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant’s monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!
Because courage, survival, love—all these things didn’t live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.
As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.
All life is only allegory and the real story is not here…
It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words – all the words that did not say things directly – were for him the most truthful.
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.
… being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.
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.
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 didn’t expect to end up with the chicken.
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.
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 low points.
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.