Quotes from Tim Winton

I'm in the business of useless beauty, he says. And I'm happy with that. I don't think art needs an excuse to exist. We need beauty in our lives, so we don't go mad.

discretion will generally keep a fella safe.

The sea is one rare wild card left in the homogenous suburban life.

What does it mean for a community to edit itself like this, to so spurn the past – or perhaps fear it – that the slate must be wiped clean for each new generation? What self-hatred does this betray?

I spose it's wrong to pray that someone dies… But I've thought about all the prayers. If that's what I was doing them years…Asking something, someone, anything, for a big black anvil to fall from the sky like in the cartoons. Kerang! On Wankbag's head. Because nothing else was gunna save [me]…

Even as a boy he'd known that his father's soul had touched him on the way up. He knew that meant something big and quiet and scary as hell

elbows-out walk like a scorpion all burred up for a fight

Say I hit your number, called you up, you'd wonder what the fuck, every one of youse, and your mouth'd go dry. Maybe you're just some stranger I pocket-dialled. Or one of them shitheads from school I could look for. Any of youse heard my voice now you'd think it was weather. Or a bird screaming. You'd be sweating sand. Like I'm the end of the world.

So we had some blues, me and Fintan. He said we were merely conducting civilised conversation. But sometimes it was like he didn't know how close he was to getting his head stove in. Or maybe he didn't care. Even so, everything was peaceful more or less. Until the wind came round from the north.

Jesus, I told meself, harden the fuck up. She heard me say that once, Mum. To me little cousin out by the laundry where he was bawling, his knee bleeding a tiny bit. She had that disgusted look on her face. What? I said. I didn't do nothin. You're no better than your father, she said. Listen to you, Jaxie, you sound just like him. I didn't talk to her for three days.

Fox grins. Go strides to the rear of the Ford. His manner never alters. The Vietnamese has purposeful intensity down pat.

We was just kids, we did kid stuff. And we didn't have things to do like people in the city. We couldn't catch the bus to the beach or the movies or hang out in big shopping malls. We had to ride everywhere or shanks it. Go for a milkshake at the roadhouse, check out the tip. Because there was no KFC or Subway. We'd walk along the highway looking for eagle feathers.

It's having the choices that kills a man. It's the best and the worst. You get to choose and you get to regret. Almost guaranteed to bugger it up. And sometimes not.

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about.

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. And death.

I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

When I was a girl I had this strong feeling that I didn't belong anywhere,... It was in my head, what I thought and dreamt, what I believed..., that's where I belonged, that was my country.

the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.

And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge.

We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.