Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.

Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.