Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy.

Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.

Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

The secret for an artist is to make that a subject and not bang your head against the wall and give up. But to turn it into and treat the new subject matter, which is one's own vanishing.

I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.

Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.