Novelists From Australia

"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."

"(Joan Lidoff) “When you talk about fiction, you connect it very closely with your life experiences. What do you think of this statement about the connections between life and art that Christina Stead wrote for a 1968 Kenyon Review symposium on the short story: The "ocean of story" is made of "the million drops of water that are the looking-glass of all our lives. "What is unique about the short story is that we all can tell one, live one, even write one down; that story is steeped in our view and emotion....Give writers a chance... (and by writers, I mean everyone, not professionals, I mean anyone with a poignant urge to tell something that happened to him once) and there will be no end to stories and what stories carry that make them vital, genuine experience and a personal viewpoint. ... The essential for us is integrity and what is genuine....That is what is best about the short story: it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one." (Grace Paley) Well, I can't put it any better than that. That's exactly the way I begin a class, by telling everybody that they are storytellers; it is absolutely so."

"'How suburban!' cried Elvira. I was in Hampstead the other day: in front of one of the richest houses was a crazy pavement: they paid about £35 for it, doubtless. The man who would have done it best was in an asylum : he would have done it for nothing, happy to do it, and the more there is of it, the more dull and plain it looks, just an expanse of conventional craziness, looking as stupid as a neanderthal skull. That's the suburbs all over. That's what we are, you see: suburban, however wild we run. You know quite well, in yourself, don't you, two people like us can't go wild? Still, it's nice to pretend to, for a while.'"

"They went on playing quietly and waiting for Sam (who had gone back to the bedroom to seek Tommy) and for their turns to see Mother. Bonnie meanwhile, with a rueful expression, was leaning out the front window, and presently she could not help interrupting them, 'Why is my name Mrs Cabbage, why not Mrs Garlic or Mrs Horse Manure?' They did not hear her, so intent were they, visiting each other and inquiring after the health of their respective new babies. They did not hear her complaining to Louie that, instead of being Mrs Grand Piano or Mrs Stair Carpet, they called her Garbage, 'Greta Garbage, Toni Toilet,' said she laughing sadly, 'because they always see me out there with the garbage can and the wet mop; association in children's naïve innocent minds you see!' 'Oh no, it isn't that, protested Louie, Garbage is just a funny word: they associate you with singing and dancing and all those costumes you have in your trunk!' 'Do you think so?' Bonnie was tempted to believe. 'Mrs Strip Tease?'"

"And Nelly turned to her and laughed a horrible laugh. She startled herself. She paused to light another cigarette, choking, blowing a cloud to hide her face; and when she could, continued in a gentle voice: "You will do me a favour? Save me from disillusionment. Let the man coming back with you on Wednesday be a sensible man, who admits it all, defeat and hopelessness and the bitterness; but sanity." "But I don't know why I should," said Camilla, seriously. "Won't you do what I ask, love? I know him, poor lad. I know what's best. I don't want him roaming the countryside, footloose and aimless and perhaps in some pub, on some roadside pick up some other harpy, instead of swallowing the bitter pill and facing the lonely road.""

"A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford."

"The conversion of mass to energy and light is the prerogative of every star."

"The wrecked Allcock, who 15 minutes earlier had finished sodomizing Bock in the library, raised his eyebrows as if wonderfully surprised."

"It can be said that deeply traumatized children grow into adults who live in the minefield of their own extreme emotions. Plus ca change."

"In the second or so it had taken that bullet to leave its muzzle and penetrate my father's heart, between the pressure of that finger on the trigger and my father's soundless roar, somewhere in that infernal compression of decision, action, and consequence, I was forever altered."

"Grief is a sphere in that it can be turned a quarter turn or turned a millionth, it can be spun on any axis and by any degree and still its aspect is the same."

"I think my parents were bewildered by my oddity."

"From the standpoint of the present, the future is always a derangement of ambitions."

"Recollections fell from me in flakes, in scales. All that remained of me was all that remains of anyone: a kind of iridescence. There was a fear that I would never again feel substantial, a fear that I would be a kind of psychic amputee."

"Psychological autopsies are also necessary to identify errors or oversights and expunge guilt."

"Ah, Caroline Brine - with your aversion to bohemians and homosexuals, students and foreigners, with your lacerated womb and scullery rat's brain, with your phosphorescent dildos and potted African violets, haunted by the ghost of your aborted baby and contaminated by envy, you freckled, you artificially tanned, you stupefyingly bland and vicious mediocrity - even after all these years, I still detest you."

"Death is a process as straightforward as mowing a lawn."

"Pills are the great infantilizers of our time. Adulthood can be wearying, and so some grow nostalgic about childhood dependencies."

"Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is the ultimate question of moral entitlement, and relevant only if right is relevant in this context, and it is not. A suicidal man cannot be concerned - and nor should he be - with questions of moral entitlement."

"The first human corpse I saw had housed my grandmother’s soul. I expected a serene mien. I expected to find her sleeping. I expected a transforming beauty, something painted by Millais. Instead, the old whore petticoats of skin."

"In wanting to kill himself, a man wants only to kill his consciousness of pain. I think therefore I am; therefore if I am not, I cannot think."

"It takes real sangfroid to stare death out. Planning your own murder is a delicate undertaking, requiring as much foresight and paperwork as that invested by some girls into their first weddings."

"Had he pushed my thighs apart right then and there, his sunned skin dark against the tallow pallor of my own nocturnal flesh, and plunged two of his thick fingers thick within me, I would have felt it apt, so natural."

"The fragile teacups, the brittle relics, the frail upholstery and shattery glass: this was a world of little things and little ways, their delicacy presupposing their protection."

"He was an admirer of the bullfight, and had once drawn my attention to the fact that only cricket and bullfighting had inspired any appreciable literature."

"The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read.Instead of which, they’re all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements."

"The great man folded his palms and bowed all around him. He had one of those either/or faces that all great Indian politicians have. This face says that it is now at peace—and you can be at peace too if you follow the owner of that face. But the same face can also say, with a little twitch of its features, that it has known the opposite of peace and it can make this other face yours too, if it wishes."

"With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open—a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road—and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed."

"Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life—’’possessive’’, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life, only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth."

"Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench—the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.The very same thing is done with human beings in this country."

"Now, there are some, and I don’t just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that ‘’none’’ of them exist. There’s just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I’m no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It’s true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work—much like our politicians—and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That’s not to say that I don’t respect them, Mr. Premier! Don’t you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time."

"A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. ‘’Ours’’ is different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen."

"The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor—they never overlap, do they?See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?Losing weight and looking like the poor."

"By the way, Mr. Premier: Have you ever noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim? And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up? It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? If you ever figure these people out, send me an e-mail."

"Mr Premier, Sir. Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English."

"Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, ‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—’’we’’ entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now."

"The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave."

"[T]he better life cannot be imposed from without—it must grow from within."

"Is there any other slavery and chain like that of temperament?"

"We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realise all they tell us."

"A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject matter, when one comes to write about it."

"There is nothing more startling in human relations than the strong emotions of weak people."

"Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance—show yourself too much, and, like , they flashed away."

"[T]he delight in natural things—colours, forms, scents—when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended."

"[M]y credo is very short. Its first article is art—and its second is art—and its third is art!"

"Conviction is the Conscience of the Mind."

"All things change,—creeds and philosophies and outward systems,—but God remains!"

"Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his market."

"Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system!"