I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

There is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings.

The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It's just as ready to claim as it is to offer.

We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.

The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.

Overfishing is an obvious threat to our capacity to feed ourselves.

It's impossible to imagine what Australia would be like without surfing.

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

Read something worth writing about or write something worth reading about

Outer beauty is transient, but the beauty of the soul is everlasting.

It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

I must have some sort of record in failing to get into the charts.

A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.

You know, I don't want to stand out too much.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

Surprising what you can dig out of books if you read long enough, isn't it?

I don't think I really started to seriously compose until around that time when I was 40.

Tolerance is the assumption of superiority