Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.
War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.
'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.
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.
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.
Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.
Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.
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.