"All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light. There was a time when I got hot under the collar if the critics said I had nothing new to say. Now I realise that they had a point. My field is the self-evident. Everything I say is obvious, although I like to think that some of the obvious things I have said were not so obvious until I said them."

"On the surface of the water, a midge vanishes into a hungry ripple. I'm not ready yet. He wonders why, at his age and having come so far, he still feels that. The culmination of his luck is that he will never feel any other way."

"When the bell rang to start the Italian hunting season, devotees of la caccia drove at full speed into the woods and shot everything that moved. Since the animals were sensibly lying low, most of the victims were people. Advancing at random through woods, the hunters - whose minds, like their expensive guns, were on a hair trigger - fired when they thought they saw something. Often they had seen each other. They also killed civilians in nearby villages. The occasional animal got hit, but only by a fluke. One man blasted a rabbit that was already hanging from another man's belt. So much vehicular traffic on the woodland roads, however, ensured that a considerable amount of wildlife was run over."

"The professor was a bore on a Guggenheim, a long-range drone, and international ballistic fossil. I spent the whole hour drawing little pictures of hanged men."

"Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film. It is just one of the things that crazy people want to do, like starting a law suit or sending long, unsolicited letters to people in the public eye. A letter from a nutter has a recognisable format and orthography, as if all letter-writing nutters have to go through some kind of Top Gun nutter-letter-writing academy."

"'He claims,' said Jenny tactfully, 'That he flew through a radioactive cloud thirty years ago and that it didn't do him any harm - thus it's all right to mine uranium. A fine piece of Australian political reasoning.'"

"And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring."

"'It's rather like a Poe story, isn't it,' said Patrick luxuriously, unfocusing his eyes. 'A person sees the chance of a better life passing by, and he makes as if to call out' - he flung one arm in the imploring gesture of a soul in torment - 'but something in his nature makes him hesitate. He pauses ... he closes his lips ... he steps back ... and then he slides down, and down, and down.'"

"On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels"

"'That,' I said, 'would be a blessing. There are so many things I'd like to forget I hardly know what would be left standing, if I ever got started.'"

"Her handwriting in these pencilled jottings, made forty-five years ago, is exactly as it is today: this makes me suspect, when I am not with her, that she is a closet intellectual."

"'Course I care. I always care. But there's no point in making a song and dance about it, like that night he stayed here. Know something? There's only one thing that'll bring 'em back, and that's indifference. The one thing you can't fake.'"

"'In my profession I have learned that women can bear more pain than men.'"

"Revolution begins in the kitchen."

"'Didn't this used to be our dining-room table back at Sutherland Street, Frank?' said Kathleen."

"'What's funny?' said Pin, shifting uncomfortably in the hospital bed."

"Our minds are not hopeful, thought Janet; but our nerves are made of optimistic stuff."

"Out in deep space the planets sweep, inexorable, along their splendid orbits. Maxine bowed her head. From now on she would take the gods' dictation."

"The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall."

"'The devil's everywhere,' he said. 'Not just at Brunswick one day and somewhere else the next. He's everywhere.'"

"'Crap,' said Janet. 'He was a whinger and he wrote it down. That's not poetry.'"

"Ideas came swarming through her, and like many people who labour in the obsession of solitude, she lacked the detachment to challenge them."