I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did.

So I was very close to ordination. I was delighted to be ordained a deacon, which is the last step between, before becoming a priest. But then it all fell apart.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

The List is Life.

But I was also a brat. I used to belong to a gang that went looking for fights with other gangs.

But in practice Australia - the pluralism of Australia - sorry the sectarianism to an extent stopped at the time you took your uniform off after coming home from school.

I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.

Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't.

The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.

It's only when you abandon your ambitions that they become possible.

In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.

Fears don't exist in isolation. They tend to rise and fall depending on what people think they can do about them.

We take creative license with the fictional narratives that become our memories. Anthologized, these are the tales that become the story of your life.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

We have rejected such spectacles as the Coliseum. How then, when we do not even look on killing lest we should contract guilt and pollution, can we put people to death?

It’s up there, and you can see the front of it. But what it is isn’t what you’re looking at. It’s behind what you’re looking at.

To his credit John Wayne was open about it, he even portrayed a member of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in a film called 'Big Jim McClain.'

I'll do as I please. My mind is not to be imprisoned.

God [is] the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion.

When I was a little boy in Worcestershire reading history books I never thought I should have to interfere between a king and his mistress.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.