Autobiographers

"Part of the job of a Prime Minister in these contemporary times is, whilst enthusiastically embracing change and globalisation, he or she must also embrace what is secure - what people see as 'home' I suppose. I want to provide Australians with this security as we embrace, as we must and will, a new and vastly different future."

"Increasingly, modern government is about facing the challenge of very rapid change but also remembering that there are certain stabilisers in society that provide reassurance and support when a society is undergoing great change particularly of an economic character."

"The debate over Australian history .. risks being distorted if its focus is confined only to the shortcomings of previous generations. It risks being further distorted if highly selective views of Australian history are used as the basis for endless and agonised navel-gazing about who we are or, as seems to have happened over recent years, as part of a 'perpetual seminar' for elite opinion about our national identity. The current debate over Australian history would benefit from a more balanced approach, from a wider perspective and from less pre-ordained pessimism. In the broad balance sheet of our history, there is a story of great Australian achievement to be told."

"The 'black armband' view of our history reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. I take a very different view. I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud of than which we should be ashamed."

"In a sense, it's always a sombre moment in a country where you ask the people who have done the right thing to put up with inconvenience because a limited number of people have done the wrong thing, but that is the nature of a democratic society."

"By the year 2000 I would like to see an Australian nation that feels comfortable and relaxed about three things. I would like to see them comfortable and relaxed about their history. I would like to see them comfortable and relaxed about the present and I'd also like to see them comfortable and relaxed about the future."

"I've never believed in lower wages. Never. Never believed in lower wages, I've never believed in lower wages as an economic instrument."

"There's no way that a GST will ever be part of our policy... never ever, it's dead it was killed by the voters in the last election."

"Truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life."

"I don't think it is wrong, racist, immoral or anything, for a country to say 'we will decide what the cultural identity and the cultural destiny of this country will be and nobody else'."

"I'm not in favour of going back to a White Australia policy. I do believe that, if it [non-European immigration] is in the eyes of some in the community, it's too great, it would be in our immediate term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater."

".. you must remember that the Australian voter has a short memory span... in fact, less than 14 days in most cases!"

"John Howard was prime minister and it was a hard time in the indigenous world; it was difficult to know how to deal with what was happening"

"Monday will be the 25th anniversary of one of the most prophetic speeches in Australian political history. Then prime minister Paul Keating told the National Press Club: "When the government changes, the country changes ... but what we've built in these years is, I think, so valuable - to change it and to lose it, is just a straight appalling loss for Australia." He was dead right. The legacy of John Howard's government is the opposite of the picture he painted on election night in 1996, when he restated that "united Australians were infinitely more important and more enduring than the things that divided Australians". Instead, he favoured the well-off, the strong and big business over the vulnerable, the less wealthy and wage and salary earners."

"Australia wins respect in the world when we display who we are and not what self-appointed cultural dieticians would want us to become. Multiculturalism is not our national cement. Rather it is the Australian achievement, which has many components."

"I brought a philosophical road map to government. It was bitterly opposed by some but, for a long time, supported by more. Both supporters and critics knew what I stood for."

"The true Human Being is the Innermost, He does not have problems. The problems are from the mind."

"As long as we continue to be imprisoned within the corrupt and rancid norms of the intellect, it will be more than impossible to experience that which is not of the mind, that which is not of time, that which is real."

"Delirium tremens in a drunk alcoholic are an unmistakable symptom, but those intoxicated with theories are easily mistaken for geniuses."

"The teachings of the Zend Avesta are in accordance with the doctrinal principles contained in the Egyptian book of the dead, and contain the Christ-principle. The Illiad of Homer, the Hebrew Bible, the Germanic Edda and the Sibylline Books of the Romans contain the same Christ-principle. All these are sufficient in order to demonstrate that Christ is anterior to Jesus of Nazareth. Christ is not one individual alone. Christ is a cosmic principle that we must assimilate within our own physical, psychic, somatic and spiritual nature… Among the Persians, Christ is Ormuz, Ahura Mazda, terrible enemy of Ahriman (Satan), which we carry within us. Amongst the Hindus, Krishna is Christ; thus, the gospel of Krishna is very similar to that of Jesus of Nazareth. Among the Egyptians, Christ is Osiris and whosoever incarnated him was in fact an Osirified One. Amongst the Chinese, the Cosmic Christ is Fu Hi, who composed the I-Ching (The Book of Laws) and who nominated Dragon Ministers. Among the Greeks, Christ is called Zeus, Jupiter, the Father of the Gods. Among the Aztecs, Christ is Quetzalcoatl, the Mexican Christ. In the Germanic Edda, Baldur is the Christ who was assassinated by Hodur, God of War, with an arrow made from a twig of mistletoe, etc. In like manner, we can cite the Cosmic Christ within thousands of ancient texts and old traditions which hail from millions of years before Jesus. The whole of this invites us to embrace that Christ is a cosmic principle contained within the essential principles of all religions."

"What is the use of education if we do not become creative, conscious and truly intelligent? Real education does not mean knowing how to read and write. Any stupid person, any fool can know how to read and write. We need to have intelligence and it only awakens within us when the consciousness awakens."

"All things, all circumstances that occur outside ourselves, on the stage of this world, are exclusively the reflection of what we carry within. With good reason then, we can solemnly declare that the 'exterior is the reflection of the interior.' When someone changes internally and if that change is radical, then circumstances, life and the external also change."

"My dear friends, now and forever, I renounce, have renounced and will go on renouncing copyrights. My only wish is that these books be sold at low price, affordable to the poor, affordable to all the children of God. I wish that even the poorest, most destitute citizen be able to obtain these books with the few pennies he carries in his pocket. In fact, I do not have any income; I do not demand anything in exchange for my works. Whosoever wants to publish them, let him publish for the benefit of diseased mankind."

"The mind must free itself from all kinds of “schools,” religions, sects, beliefs, etc. All those “cages” are obstacles which render the mind incapable of thinking freely. It is necessary for the mind to become free of the illusions of this world and become a fine and marvelous instrument of the Inner Being."

"Interviewer: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism? García Márquez: That's a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you."

"Chinese literature cannot be separated from world literature. The impact of Marquez on me can be viewed as a communication between the minds of a foreign writer and a Chinese writer. On the basis of the impact from outside, the Chinese writer can transform and develop his own style."

"I'm more interested in writers like Marquez who have an instinctive way of handling the natural and the legendary in close proximity. This is very understandable to me in my part of the world; something not quite fantasy, and so much more compelling than the stilted naturalism of much metropolitan literature. He creates more than a mere replica of what happened during the day, more than a record of who said what."

"In One Hundred Years of Solitude,/Márquez wrote that we are birthed/by our mothers only once, but life obligates/us to give birth/to ourselves over and over."

"They thought Gabriel García Márquez's would be the way, because of his richness, because his work can be multilayer. He can use the Indian past and the Catholic-Spanish heritage. Keep it all. You don't have to cut that out, cut this out."

"I really admire Marquez's novel Chronicles of a Death Foretold. And one of the things that's so wonderful about the book is that it's very short, and he says a lot with very few words, and the characters show a lot of change. But he's a master, and I think if you're really good you can do it in less space; if you're new and inexperienced it takes longer."

"I read Marquez when I was a student and One Hundred Years of Solitude is kind of the bible that I used to try to figure out stories and how to tell them. But I also think that their [his and Isabel Allende's] sense of indigenous people and the land is very limited."

"Such a lovely man."

"Puerto Rico, like all the countries of the Caribbean, is a nation where fantastic reality, the world of magic, is ever present. There are various sects of white magic, such as Santeria. It is a reality that is very palpable in our environment, and this is why there are no great differences between fantasy and reality. This is also true in the work of writers like García Márquez, whom I consider a Caribbean writer because Aracataca, which is the setting for the imaginary Macondo, is in the Caribbean. All Caribbean writers have this in common."

"(When did you notice this change with publishers-when they finally started publishing Latinos?) JOC: I think it was a couple of years after Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize and the so-called Latino boom began. All of a sudden people said, "Hey, these guys may have something important to say.""

"Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc."

"I had already read One-hundred Years of Solitude when I was in college, probably because that was when it was translated into English. I sent a copy in Spanish to my parents, saying, “Look this is just like our family stories!” And they said, “Yes, this is like our story-telling tradition.”"

"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges, and the Mexican, Elena Garro, wrote Remembrance of Things to Come (1962) before the publication of García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)."

"… for an instant I thought about stopping the cab to say goodbye, but I preferred not to defy again a destiny as uncertain and persistent as mine."

"I couldn't tell you because even I don't know who I am yet."

"Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading."

"Because for you, quitting smoking would be like killing someone you love."

"… my unhealthy timidity might be a great obstacle to me in my life."

"… nothing was easy, least of all surviving Sunday afternoons without love."

"… no sooner had you done something than someone else appeared who threatened to do it better."

"There are no two men in this world more similar than you and him," she told me. "And that's the worst thing for having a conversation."

"From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preserves so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death."

"It was impossible to conceive of two creatures so different who got along so well and loved each other so much."

"But I believe without any doubt at all that our greatest good fortune was that even in the most extreme difficulties we might lose our patience but never our sense of humor."

"Children's lies are signs of great talent."