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

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.

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.

The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf.

Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance.

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep.

Nothing is ever enough.

Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.

A fiction writer is never entirely alone. Her characters are constantly whispering in her ear.

By 1969, when I celebrated 45 years in the music business, I also had 45 people in our musical family.

But I was 22 before I took my first dance class. I had never been athletic, so I was very stiff; I still am. I think what I got mostly from dance was carriage.

You can never forget the people who were always there for you from the beginning.

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

Happiness is something that you are, and it comes from the way you think.