The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national,...

He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more than the reading of poetry;...

For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it...

I am part of all that I have met.

In Australia the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didn’t expect to end up with the chicken.

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still...

It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words – all the words that did not say things directly – were for him the most truthful.

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age...

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here…

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.

to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant’s monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!

Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans’ earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding...

Men’s lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations,...

We’ve been trained to live a life of moral cowardice while all the time comforting ourselves that we are nature’s rebels. But in truth we’ve never got upset & excited about anything; we’re like the...

And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount...

Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it’s seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment...

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae,...

Because courage, survival, love—all these things didn’t live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was...

Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing...

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of...

As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.

It was a part he felt himself feeling his way into, and the longer it went on, the more the men around him confirmed him in his role. It was as if they were willing...