Patrick White Quotes
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Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
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I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.
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In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school.
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I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood.
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Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.
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In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.
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When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge.
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I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
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My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.
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Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
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As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains.
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Loonies speak their own language, like educated people.
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I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.
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I can only stick my neck out and offer my humble beliefs. If I become an outsider by doing so, this won't be a great hardship as I've been that as far back as I can remember - something strange and unacceptable in the eyes of those who believe they see straight. At least it's given me courage of a kind, which I'd like every Australian to acquire.
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In the last couple of years I've been doing this sort of thing constantly, often repeating myself, becoming an avoidable Doomsday bore. But anything of importance - like a garden, a human relationship, a child, a religious faith, even the most convinced brand of atheism has to be worked on constantly if it is to survive.
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The essence of what you have to say you pick up before you're twenty.
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If she had only been able to touch him, they might perhaps have pooled their secrets and discovered the reason for human confusion. But as that wasn't possible, she went outside, into the garden.
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The spirit may triumph where politics (the League and the United Nations), socio-political faiths such as Marxism, Italian Fascism and German National-Socialism - all have failed. I see our only hope in faith, charity, and in humbling ourselves before man and God.
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Conversation is imperative if gaps are to be filled, and old age, it is the last gap but one.
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In my books I have lifted bits from various religions in trying to come to a better understanding; I've made use of religious themes and symbols. Now, as the world becomes more pagan, one has to lead people in the same direction in a different way.