I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.

You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.

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.

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

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.

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.