It is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God...The love song is the sound of our endeavors to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.

I lost my innocence with Johnny Cash. I used to watch the Johnny Cash Show on television in Wangaratta when I was about 9 or 10 years old. At that stage I had really no idea about rock'n'roll. I watched him and from that point I saw that music could be an evil thing, a beautiful, evil thing.

At school I was an anti-magnet for women.

You write a scene, and it works or it doesn't. It's immediate.

I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination.

The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.

I have to be able to see the thing that's going on that I'm writing about, or else it just doesn't make any sense to me.