"Why can't a writer use writing as a painter uses paint? I try to. When I wrote The Tree of Man I felt I couldn't write about simple, illiterate people in a perfectly literate way; but in my present novel the language is more sophisticated. I think perhaps I have clarified my style quite a lot over the years. I find it a great help to hear the language going on around me; not that what I write, the narrative, is idiomatic Australian, but the whole work has a balance and rhythm which is influenced by what is going on around you. When you first write the narrative it might be unconscious, but when you come to work it over you do it more consciously. It gives what I am writing a greater feeling of reality."
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LGBT peopleNobel laureates in LiteratureNovelists from EnglandPlaywrights from EnglandNovelists from Australia
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Patrick White
Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) was an Australian novelist and winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.
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