Patrick White

"In recent years we have been served up a lot of claptrap about the need for a national identity. We have been urged to sing imbecile jingles, flex our muscles like the sportsmen from telly commercials…"

"I don't think I am ghoulish in saying that I would like them, and every morally responsible citizen of the world, particularly my fellow Australians of the World War II period, to refresh their memori…"

"I've lost interest in the theatre because you can't get what you want ever. I used to think it would be wonderful to see what you had written come to life. Here in Australia it's very hard to get an a…"

"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."

"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…"

"Many of those who hear me believe I am putting on an act, while others who had considered I am one who surely knows the answers, are depressed to find that, by my own admission, I don't. What I do kno…"

"In the 14th Century an anonymous English mystic wrote a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, the main theme of which is that God cannot be apprehended by man's intellect and that only love can pierce t…"

"The ideal of non-attachment has been preached again and again in the course of the last 3000 years. It is found in Hinduism, the teachings of Buddha, the doctrine of Lao Tsu, in the philosophy of the …"