My wife is a lovely leathery green, the blue-tongued lizard said;Her eyes are as red as bulldog ants, lurking in holes in her head;Her body is made of the speckled grass, a violet grows on...

Because we were stranded together and because I stuttered, we read. there is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My...

A magpie can be happy or sad: sometimes so happy that he sits on a high, high gum tree and rolls the sunrise around in his throat like beads of pink sunlight; and sometimes so...

The green sea swept into the shallows and seethed there like slaking quicklime. It surged over the rocks, tossing up spangles of water like a juggler and catching them deftly again behind. It raced knee-deep...

I’m sure it’s not any wish of mine that I’m born with inclinations for better things. If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I’d be born the lowest and coarsest-minded...

There is any amount of love and good in the world, but you must search for it. Being misunderstood is one of the trials we all must bear. I think that even the most common-minded...

‘I don’t believe there is a God’, I said fiercely, ‘and if there is, He’s not the merciful being He’s always depicted, or He wouldn’t be always torturing me for His own amusement.’

Sometimes books feel like the only thing that keep her sane. Actually, she knows that they’re the only reason she’s still even vaguely okay right now. That’s what she clings to: reading great books and...

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn’t ‘a nice man’, and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers’ work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a...

If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it’s his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it...

The burning off and the gathering together are one.