A problem not so well understood is the growing presence of plastics in the marine food chain. If we don't make big changes fast, the fish we do save may no longer be safe to eat.

There is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings.

The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It's just as ready to claim as it is to offer.

We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.

The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.

Overfishing is an obvious threat to our capacity to feed ourselves.

It's impossible to imagine what Australia would be like without surfing.

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

We are now left to choose between danger and regret, neither of which can restore the lives we have lost.

I am not aspiring to be a senior bureaucrat. It would limit my freedom.

Is there any one maxim which ought to be acted upon throughout one's whole life? Surely the maxim of loving kindness is such: Do not unto others what you would not they should do unto you.

When the heart gets into prayer, every beat of the heart creates a miracle.

What if instead of focusing on what you don't have, you concentrate on what you've got?

Digital media enables us to build more stages for our kids to express themselves.

The quickest way to create a boy or man who lacks compassion is to judge and shame his feelings.

Just once, I want to meet the villain in a cheerful, brightly lit room. Possibly one with kittens.

To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls.

Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.