Quotes from Tim Winton

This land looks dreamt, willed, potent.

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

She was still glad she looked like Scully. He wasn't pretty either, but pretty people weren't the kind you need. Pretty people saw themselves in the mirror and were either too happy or too sad. People like Billie just shrugged and didn't care. She didn't want to turn into anyone pretty. Anyway, she had scars now, you only had to look.

There's things that have no finish, Scully, no ending to speak of. There's no justice to it, but that's the God's truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em.

Here, said the nuggety bald fixture. You look dry as a camel's cookie.

Rare as rocking-horse turds, these days, feeling halfway to decent, with barely a sick twinge, and he was damned if he'd waste

Old Scully, who according to Jennifer, hadn't the imagination to think the worst. Something she said once, as though neurosis was an artform.

She wants to be something creative,' he murmured. 'It's not something to want. It's something you have. It's a curse. One she doesn't have.

Glamour-hounds and donor-hogs they may be but he loved them.

out there houses are rare as rocking horse turds.

On our hunger to control and know everything humans break and spoil

Few landscapes have been so deeply known. And fewer still have been so lightly inhabited.

I invested them with a bogus nobility. To a suburban kid they seemed so special, enduring, wild and stiff-necked, in amongst the ancient rocks and gnarled trees, and while it was true enough they carried their secret places in their bodies and in their language, many simply wore their ordinary, dreary undigested pasts like rain-sodden greatcoats and lived like cripples.

Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn't the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia, you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes...

architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades...

Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was.

She was like a sheet anchor sometimes, a steadying influence on him, on everyone around her. Made people laugh, that sensible streak in her, but it also made her someone of substance.

Every vegetable, every bit of protein on the list had a provenance more complex than a minor Rembrandt.

I go out to the cliffs with binoculars to see whales find their way in from the southern mist and I walk here in this paddock, stubbornly, wondering at the heat each of us leaves in our wake.

During those years of travel I saw that architecture is what we console ourselves with once we've obliterated our natural landscapes.

Time to experiment. Necessity being the motherfucker of whatever is in its way.

People are fools, not monsters

Please God, whatever I was I am no longer….All is forgotten, if not forgiven—it could have come to that. But I don't trust the thought. I don't know if it's because it would be too easy or too terrible to imagine no one cares anymore.

You've been busy, he said. Want something done, ask a busy person.