Quotes from Patrick White

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.

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.

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.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.

My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.

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.

In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.

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.

I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.

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.

I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.

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.

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.

Life is full of alternatives but no choice.

I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

To make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself.

The map? I will first make it.

Reason finally holds a gun at its head - and does not always miss.

There's nothing so inhuman as a human being.

Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest.