You're a free-standing landing pad held together by choir claps.

The future gets no say in who we are.

Pretend – inside your skin – you've got a friend, who's willing to give you everything you ever wanted in exchange for all you've ever been.

Stop inviting walls into wide open spaces.

What paper planes and empty seats most have in common is that they are best made by children still learning how to ride things out.

Hearts don't break, y'all. They bruise and get better.

I am standing like shoe polish on an overstocked shelf hoping that one day someone will pick me to make things better.

If you've never been rocked back by the presence of purpose this poem is too soon for you. Return to your mediocrity, plug it into an amplifier and rethink yourself.

The first time my town saw the sky it sucker-punched us in the throat, left us breathless, said, I'm gonna keep you awake some nights without touching you. You'll make it up, the pain, you always do.

If I didn't have so much of this life all wrong I would have gotten it right by now.

You are the home I point to that lives in my chest.

Representing Australia has always been a honour and a privilege, and the older and more experienced I get, the more I enjoy it.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

Will do Satan's work for food.

I'm not a nervous person. I'm not afraid to be on TV. I'm only afraid when I write. When I'm at my desk I feel like most people would feel if they went on TV.

She's descended from a long line her mother listened to.

When I was a kid, I always saw these pictures of a man called Bob Gordon with a baritone saxophone, who I understood was my father. Turns out he wasn't. He was my mother's first husband.

I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.

Malaysia-Singapore bilateral relations can blossom beautifully if cultivated and nurtured like an orchid plant.

The minute you feel secure about yourself and own the fact your dreams are honest true, other things fix themselves.

There exists for every liquid a temperature at which no amount of pressure is sufficient to retain it in the liquid form.