Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

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.

Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.

The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.

A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there