Ever to confess you're bored means you have no Inner Resources.
That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.
It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.
I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.
The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.
On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels
And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.
I dont really enjoy watching reality TV.
I start to paint my walls. And I'm heavily influenced by films.
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Give me a Japanese division armed with bamboo spears and I'll wipe out the entire Russian Far Eastern Army.