Thomas was my true name but everyone knew me as Mick, except my mother, who knew me as definitely Michael.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

Coitus is random, children are definite.

Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't.

So I was very close to ordination. I was delighted to be ordained a deacon, which is the last step between, before becoming a priest. But then it all fell apart.

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century.

I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.