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

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.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

The List is Life.

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

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.

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.

Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't.

The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.

It's only when you abandon your ambitions that they become possible.

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

It's SO much worse in high school! People talk about who's dating with such GRAVITY, like they're talking about wikileaks.

The most efficient way to live reasonably is every morning to make a plan of one's day and every night to examine the results obtained.

There's a group in California that wants to make suicide a capital offense punishable by death. That's like punishing someone for being on a hunger strike by sending them to bed with no supper.

Growing up with three boys in a heavily male-dominated world, I especially needed to express myself as a woman.

When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it

My aim in homeschooling is to give my children the ability to be an adult learner, a skill set that will last the rest of their lives.

Where there is a will there is a way.

Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.