God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.

If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.

You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.

I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.

Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.

I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are.

I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.

I get more optimistic as I get older.

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.

In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.

If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real.

Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.

The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.

In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.

I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.

Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.