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

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.

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.

Life is nothing more than a contradiction.

Sharing is caringYou will share with those Whom you care

Don't celebrate how old you are, celebrate the years you survived.

I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.

See God gave us the talent, but the devil make us famous.

The more we pray, the more we think to pray, and as we see the results of prayer-the responses of our Father to our requests-our confidence in God's power spills over into other areas of our life.

The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.

I admire my mother. She raised four kids and worked and had no help.

I've always been into improvisation.

I'd been collecting different ethnic instruments here and there, and then I started making little bell type stuff, looking for weird little sound toys.