Quotes from Janette Turner Hospital

The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.

There is always a gap between conception and execution. We keep writing in the burning hope of closing that gap before we die.

What comes before and after we know not.

Nothing, however, is certain except uncertainty and there is always interference in the lines of flight.

Le seul risque est de ne pas en prendre

Her days come and go like birds, her dreams like days.

FLIGHT OF FOLLY. WOMAN TRAPPED IN CAGE OF OPEN DOORS.

That is where homeland is. In that shifting space, kinfolk know one another by secret signs; and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.

From outer darkness to outer darkness, a feathered meteor through a moment of light...

They whisper: no little man from Customs and Immigration stands at the doors of memory or imagination demanding to see your passport. No arts bureaucrat or ComLit satrap can stamp OzLit, CanLit, FemLit, MigrantLit, or Displaced Person on your visa.

I like to hope that there are more good people in the world than evil people' she said. 'I would like to hope that too', the old man said, 'but I don't. There are good people, however, and our duty in life is to be one of them, even though we will generally be outnumbered.

That is where homeland is. In that shifting space, kinfold know one another by secret signs; and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.

Cap notices the first red and gold leaves of the fall eddying on the surface of the lake. Do they make a pattern? Perhaps. She could impose form: a ragged spiral; a cluster disrupted by ducks; a single reed caught between reeds. She could impose symbolic meaning. She believes this may be life's primary requirement: to impose a tolerable meaning on randomness.

We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.

I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.

There are all kinds of under-represented groups in the literary establishment.

The world is crammed with messages. We'll never have time to read them all.

All of my writing career is about how human beings negotiate dark matter.