I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.
'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.
The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.
Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.
In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.
My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school.
We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.
I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
I do not come out of a literary tradition.
If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real.
I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.
I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.
I get more optimistic as I get older.
I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are.
