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" I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it. "

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" I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little. "

" At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine. "

" My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before. "

" I woke up in Australia almost every day for the first 47 years of my life. When I left, I didn't discard that, didn't reject that, didn't forget that. Not even New York City can wipe that out. "

" Culture is the way for a country to know itself. "

" I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life. "

" I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book. "

" The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows. "

" So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things. "

" I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn't understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people. "

" What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?' "

" Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way. "

" The Australian cast of mind is not something I would want to be without - and I couldn't be without. It's not a choice. "

" I like how they are. I think they're great. And their communities are communities. I have a greater sense of community in New York than almost anywhere I've ever lived. Really, it's terrific. "

" I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from. "

" Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past. "

" I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past. "

" I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me. "

" And it's always possible that you will not get a nice review. So - and that's enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can't talk back, and it's sort of shaming in a way. "

" Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent. "

" Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame. "

" One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that. "

" Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry. "

" I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window. "