Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.
If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.
When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.
After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.
Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew.
I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.
I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.
Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you to say all those things.
The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.
Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
