Thirteen quotes from three notebooks

‘It seems we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive.  There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.’
George Eliot

‘If anything is fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.’
Robert Louis Stevenson

‘I just want to write songs that make people feel loved.’
Brian Wilson

 ‘To compose a novel is to set different emotional spaces side by side – and that, to me, is the writer’s subtlest craft.’
Milan Kundera

‘Writing is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.’
George Orwell

‘Go boldly forward and write the email to Australia and the world that says, Your position is not sustainable.  You cannot keep going in this direction.  Something is going to give: it may be your relationships, it may be your infrastructure, it may be your children, or it may be you.’
John Marsden

‘Like most comic novelists, I take the novel extremely seriously. It is the best of all forms – open and personal, intelligent and inquiring.  I value it for its scepticism, its irony and its play.’
Malcolm Bradbury

‘I’ve discovered that it is enough for a single note to be played beautifully.’
Arvo Pärt

‘Never state what you can imply.’
Jean Cocteau

‘Find the place where passion and precision are one.’
WB Yeats

‘The first paragraph brought the tingle of expectation I know when theatre lights dim.’
Pam Skutenko (in a review of Dorothy Hewett’s A Baker’s Dozen, Overland 164 2001)

‘Before you start writing a book make sure you’ve got something to say.’
Manning Clark

‘Novels are always about time.’
Margaret Atwood