People From Perth

"When you hit 30 I think, inevitably, whether you’ve had children or not, I think you re-evaluate your life a little bit."

"It's human nature to put people on a pedestal."

"Loving yourself is so important, when you achieve this you’ll be capable of fully loving someone else."

"They are both women trying to exist in a patriarchal world, and it’s interesting that they’re decades apart in time but facing similar problems, which is again, an age-old issue."

"I just think with boys they get away with being lads and cowboys and it’s an age-old myth that’s existed for a very long time. And I don’t really know how we fight it or change it."

"We are less forgiving of female mistakes in general."

"I think we’re held to a higher standard because we’re meant to be mothers, and I think the Madonna-whore complex still exists quite a lot."

"I just think people in the creative industries... crave normalcy and stability and the mundane, and then I also crave producing, writing, developing and working on both sides of the camera."

"Can you see what it is yet?"

"There's an old Australian stockman -- er, , trying, dying. They get themselves up on their collective elbows, revert to their sixties instrumentation, and they try again."

"I'm Jake the Peg, diddle-iddle-iddle-um, with my extra leg, diddle-iddle-iddle-um."

"There's an old Australian stockman, lying, dying... and he gets himself up on one elbow, and he turns to his mates, who are gathered 'round him and he says..."

"He swore, pissed off, trying to keep the past in the past instead of stinking up the present."

"The future was not what it used to be."

"He felt a trickle of cold fear in the depths of his belly, a dread that he was going to get his wish."

"It was hard to just sit and relax. Everyone he saw somehow looked suspicious, especially all those people who appeared perfectly innocuous: nobody who looked that innocuous could be anything but guilty, Spider thought."

"The coffee, when he tried it, was strong almost to the point of being unbearable, but not quite. In short, it was divine."

"“So what is this Final Secret? Any Ideas?” Spider asked, trying to sound reasonable. “We don’t know. We just don’t know. All we know is what the Vores have communicated to us so far.” “Right,” Spider said, nodding, hating every moment of this nonsense. “And when you say ‘we’ and ‘us’, what you really mean is ‘you’, yes?” “They communicate through a living channel, yes, and that is, of course, me.”"

"To change the subject, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot.” “What about?” “Free will.” “Free will?” “Yeah,” he said, trying not to fidget, a weird feeling in his head. “I reckon free will is bullshit.” “You need to get some sleep, Spider.” “No, no, I feel okay, more or less.” “Free will,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s an illusion. That’s all it is. Everything is already sorted out, every decision, every possibility, it’s all determined, scripted, whatever.” Iris was looking at him as if she was worried. “Where’d all this come from?” “I’ve been to the End of bloody Time, Iris. From that perspective, everything is done and settled. Basically, everything that could happen has happened. It’s all mapped out, documented, diagrammed, written up in great big books, and ignored.” “You’re a crazy bastard, you know that, Spider?” “Maybe not crazy enough,” he said. Iris was still struggling for traction on the conversation. “You think everything is predetermined? Is that it? But what about—” “No. You just think you have free will.” “So, according to you,” Iris said, looking bewildered, “a guy who kills his wife was always going to kill her. She was always going to die.” “From his point of view, he doesn’t know that, and neither does she, but yeah. She was always a goner, so to speak.” “There is no way I can accept this,” she said. “It’s intolerable. It robs individual people of moral agency. According to you nobody chooses to do anything; they’re just following a script. That means nobody’s responsible for anything.” “I said free will is an illusion. We think we’ve got moral agency, we think we make choices. It’s a perfect illusion. It just depends on your point of view.” “It’s a bloody pathway to madness, I reckon,” Iris said. “I dunno,” he said. “Right now, sitting here, thinking about everything, I think it makes a lot of sense. Kinda, anyway.” “Think you’ll find that’s just an illusion,” she said, and flashed a tiny smile."

"You up for it, or am I going in again? Please note, by the way, there is only one correct answer to this question."

"It was a hard thing to contemplate, even harder to accept, the inevitable tide of technological progress, which even as it created careers for some, also destroyed careers for others."

"He’d lived with a mad sculptress for long enough that he knew (believed, really) that much of what passed for art these days was bullshit, all naked emperors and nobody commenting on it. In any case, as soon as he registered, “ah, sculpture”, he lost interest and looked away."

"“When Dickhead was a little kid, he had this, hmm, ‘religious experience’, I suppose you’d call it. For all we know his little wee brain might just have had a stroke or some damn thing. Upshot, though, was he thought an actual angel appeared before him, and told him all kinds of neat but apocalyptic stuff about the universe, about God’s decision to start over, and that only the very few, the Chosen, could be part of it, and thus find out about the Final Secret of the Cosmos.” “But that’s bullshit, surely.”"

"“But that...” Spider paused, “is a fine piece of movie magic.” From a time when movies were magic, the last days of the old Hollywood studio system. These days if a film called for a prop like that, it would most likely be rendered digitally; if it had to exist in the real world at all, it could be whomped up in a 3D printer, sintered from various powders, fused together with lasers—and utterly disposable, like most of the films that came along these days. Nobody would preserve such a thing; nobody would see the point in keeping and restoring such props. It was a sad thing, at least for people Spider’s age, who remembered better times."

"“Okay, then,” Spider said. “I have the D6. I have the wicked power of pseudo-random number generation right here in my hot little hand.”"

"Spider had to keep that firmly in his mind. It was a lesson he had learned on the job: things are not always as they seem. Sometimes, even most times, they are far stranger than you’d imagine, and most likely more perverse than you’d care to consider."

"“Spider, please, sit. I will explain everything.” “You’ll explain everything. Fine. Great!” Spider said, but inside, in his mind, he was thinking, Bag and cat have now parted company."

"The great majority of them came back a week later, complaining that it was all Spider’s fault. Yes, he thought, it was his fault. It was his fault for trying to help idiots."

"The thing Spider hated about time machines was that people got them, thinking they could fix everything that had gone wrong in their lives. Thinking they could go back and make amends for things they wished they’d not done. Thinking they could save loved ones from terrible fates, or magically improve their love lives. Too many people thought of time machines as magical “Get out of Personal Responsibility Free” devices. In times past, if you did something rotten, or hurt someone you loved, or didn’t do so well with the ladies, you tried to learn from it, and maybe become a better person in the future. Now people who’d done those sorts of things—and worse—simply figured, Oh well, I’ll jump in my time machine, and fix it. Which was fine, but in ninety-eight percent of such cases, time machine operators succeeded only in making their situations worse."

"“What about your art?”... “I gave it up.” “Gave it up? How could you give it up?” He was shaken at the news. Molly no longer an artist? He didn’t know artists could even do that; he thought it was a lifetime thing, like a sentence."

"You going somewhere with this, Spider, or can we just take it as read that you’re a bit cranky today?"

"“Spider!” Mr. Patel said, coming up to him, taking his hand, pumping it hard. “You’re a hard man to find!” “Evidently not hard enough.”"

"And in that moment, Spider noticed a strange thing. He found to his surprise that he did not dislike Mr. Patel. Which, obviously, was a long way from liking the man, but who knew? Maybe that would come in time."

"“The bloody future,” Spider muttered. “What’s it ever done for us?”"

"Maybe he was crazy, he thought. It would explain everything. Insanity was good that way."

"He was just so respected in the industry. It's just horribly tragic. He was just a fine actor and a good person, so this is horribly sad and very unexpected."

"It's really, really sad. I hope his family is okay. I wish them the best."

"I adored him. I don't know how to compare his talent to others but he's touched me deeply as a talent and it's a great loss - losing him at any age would be a loss but it was pretty rough news. I was really shocked by it."

"Please respect our need to grieve privately. My heart is broken. I am the mother of the most tender-hearted, high-spirited, beautiful little girl who is the spitting image of her father. All that I can cling to is his presence inside her that reveals itself every day. His family and I watch Matilda as she whispers to trees, hugs animals, and takes steps two at a time, and we know that he is with us still. She will be brought up with the best memories of him."

"We mourn the loss of a remarkable talent gone too soon... and the passing of an extraordinary man who will be greatly missed."

"I'm not good at future planning. I don't plan at all. I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I don't have a day planner and I don't have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future."

"I had a year where I sat around on my butt and declined generous offers to do more teen movies and more of the same characters as the one from 10 Things. I was literally living off Ramen noodles and water just because I was sticking to my guns. It was very hard because they offer you so much money. It's so easy to say, 'Ah fuck it, at least I can live and eat.'"

"All of this is so insignificant. In the grand scale of things, there have been so many before who have been in this position. I'm just another one. Life is so short. It's like we're already gone, really, in retrospect."

"[I'm] an extremely private dude and all this is happening so damn quick. I really haven't had any time to rationalize it. But it's nothing that I'm going to let freak me out or take control of me or my thoughts or my real life."

"I love acting. Oh, God, I love it. But all this fame and all this bullshit attention. I'm not supernatural. I've done nothing extremely special to deserve the position. It happens every couple of years, and it's happened to hundreds of people before me."

"I'm in control of my life, not anyone in Hollywood. I only do this because I'm having fun. The day I stop having fun, I'll just walk away. I wasn't going to have fun doing a teen movie again. I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. I don't. I don't even want to spend the rest of my youth doing this in this industry. There's so much more I want to discover."

"When anything is blocking my head or there's worry in my life, I just go sit on Mars or something and look back here at Earth. All you can see is this tiny speck. You don't see the fear. You don't see the pain. You don't see thought. It's just one solid speck. Then nothing really matters. It just doesn't."

"I'm the worst auditioner, really, really bad. I mean, you're being judged and I'm just so aware of it that it consumes me. I can't relax, I'm tied in knots, so the voice is very taut and tense. You're so aware that you're acting 'cause you're sitting across from this lady with a piece of paper who's going, I'm. Going. To. Shoot. You. If. You. Don't. Blah, blah, blah, in this emotionless voice. It's foul. I hate it."

"I don't have a technique. I've never been a believer in having one set technique on how to act. There are no rules and there is no rulebook. At the end of the day, it all comes down to my instincts. That's the one thing that guides me through every decision professionally. Socially, also. That's my technique. Yeah, you read through the script 100 times. I guess I have little characteristics about myself. Sometimes, most often than not, once we start shooting I won't look at the script at all until we finished shooting. It's kind of like it's been imprinted in my head during rehearsals. You just let it go."

"Most of the time you don't even know they're there. Now, that's the scary thing. It's really strange and invading, but I'm still working it all out. I try to not let it bother me. And if I want to swim naked in my pool, I'm still going to do it. I certainly don't want to feel that I have to change everything in my life that I do to cater to them. I just won't let it happen."