Quotes from Tim Winton

Being afreaid proves you're alive and awake.

Everything was normal and right. There were dishes in the sink and the sound of kids playing in the street and the trains passing smutty wind. Something had settled over the kitchen. Rose kept the colours inside the lines and all the patterns were proper, sensible and neat. Happiness. That's what it was.

I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.

Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers

I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have

He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed.

And as an artist, as someone who writes stories and tries to make words into beautiful forms, it's vitally important to me, especially in a culture that's forgotten the value of beauty. It's a primary source or inspiration, I guess, when so much of what goes on around you is only about money and big swinging dick capitalism. It's important for blokes to be able to do beautiful stuff, impractical stuff, that adds to life. That's an early life-lesson from surfing.

And somehow, somewhere along the track, I went numb. I couldn't say what it was & didn't dare try. How do you explain the sense of being made to feel improper ? I withdrew into a watchful rectitude, anxious to please, risking nothing. I followed the outline of my life, carefully rehearsing form without conviction, like a bishop who can't see that his faith has become an act.

Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water.

Keep the day ahead of you, that's what the old man used to say.

So you've given away the old good and evil? asked Rose, amazed at all this rare talk from Quick. No. No. I'll stay a cop. But it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us. That's what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, I just want to do right. But there's no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts.

Inside those waves our voices bounced back at us, deeper and larger for all the noise, like the voices of men.

That eye... was like a fuckin hole in the universe

And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.

Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is "anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity.

Everyone will tell you your goal is impossible, pointless, stupid, wasteful. So you hang tough. You back yourslef and only yourself.

I grew up in a family that believed love was at work in the world. I guess that's a religious idea, though of course it needn't be.

It is hard for me to speak of themes. I like the reader to do that. Otherwise it feels like writing a 3rd grade essay on someone else's work.

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.

Whatever you believe, you need faith to get through the day.

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