I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did.

And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.

And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.

Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular.

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.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

And I liked pluralist Australia. I got a taste for pluralist Australia. I like, I like Australians and I can't believe that they're going to go to hell because they tell a good dirty joke, you know.