A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.

I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.

The journey is long, the road is dark and frightening, but together we can reach our destination: the Tasmania of which we all dream, where all are welcome and all prosper, made no longer of lies but truth, built not of rich men's hate but our love for our island and for each other.