
Your American, you wouldn't know if you were up yourself.

I don't need new boots I got bluchers back down home.
Eff the effing bluchers I'll buy you new adjectival effing elastic sided boots.

men in high collars who might - this

What a torture to hear that a life had been available to me that I had not been man enough to live.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window.

She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of her soul.

Oh, we were a degree or two hotter than improper.

I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.

The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration.

Swimming always cleans your soul

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

Owever she was a woman and I'd have more luck conjuring up the thoughts of a chinaman than I would figuring out what she was conspiring

Everything we knew from life suggested that America would do what it liked ...

At the end of the day the fence were still not complete but my family had witnessed my new strength and they I could be the man

I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.