In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.

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.

People often believed they were safer in the light, thinking monsters only came out at night. But safety – like light – is a façade.

He barely knew I existed. I knew some of the same people he knew, but I was a girl in the background, several degrees of seperation removed.

I'll give you my phone number. When you worry, call me. I'll make you happy.

To read and write is a paradise.

Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

There's something about the human brain, that it actually has a predilection towards negativity, which served us really well when we lived in an environment that was very threatening.

Individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state.

Every single astronaut who has come back from space comes back determined to do more to protect it.

I like geography. I like to know where places are.

I have always hated flying. I mainly pass the time writing letters. I am very old school and I still keep many correspondences the old-fashioned way, via post.