In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

I think Melbourne is by far and away the most interesting place in Australia, and I thought if I ever wrote a novel or crime novel of any kind, I had to set it here.

I think if you live in a country, basically you share the dominant values of a country although you may disagree on issues all the time.

I like having a plot, I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.

Football makes nonsense of class. It may make nonsense of colour in some circumstances.

There's a high point in your career, and then people get bored; they want something else to come along.

As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling.

Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.

It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that’s already come true.

An institution rooted in slavery cannot be the voice of our people.

Talking isn't doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well and yet words are not deeds.

Have the willingness to go into the roots of your worst fear until you feel the essence of what you are, your pure potential, the foundation of what you really are.

Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart ache that beholds and has lost it.

America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.

...that great lover of peace, a man of giant stature who moulded, as few other men have done, the destinies of his age.

The main rule to me is to honor God with your life. To live a life of integrity. Not be selfish. You know, help others. But that's really the essence of the Christian faith.

I wish I could have a clone to do all the stuff that I don't like doing, like the red carpet stuff.