Every time you watch a performance in the theatre, you know that this is just for you, and will never be the same again. It is quite exciting for me.

When I re-read the Odyssey, it felt like I was reading PD James or Minette Walters - you feel that you are sharing in something that hundreds of millions of people have read with love, and I think that this is worth holding onto. It is not a matter of canonical texts or elitism, which the universities are trying to make us wary about. It is about shared language and metaphor and experience and imagery and that is all good.

I am coming from an older school, and I feel that you must learn to wait. There is that essay which was about the great notion of sitting on the mountain and waiting for the muses to cross the stream, and give you the symbols that would allow you to create. The word wait seems to me to be terribly important.

You are obviously writing out of experience and so the boundaries are always blurred, it is just that sometimes it would seem that you are playing with fire a little bit by choosing someone that obviously existed.

It is much easier for me to define what makes a novel French or Russian, but defining the characteristics of an Australian novel are difficult for me as it is all too close - I can't see the woods for the trees.

Writers feel that they can't afford to wait. They must do it now, and they are so clever, and there is so much competition. I'm quite happy to wait, and quite confident that the muses will cross the stream.

The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.