For several hours we were thrown and battered — till suddenly calm felt — the calmest calm I have ever experienced at sea. God had willed us to enter… - Patrick White

Why can't a writer use writing as a painter uses paint? I try to. When I wrote The Tree of Man I felt I couldn't write about simple, illiterate people in a perfectly literate way; but in my present novel the language is more sophisticated. I think perhaps I have clarified my style quite a lot over the years. I find it a great help to hear the language going on around me; not that what I write, the narrative, is idiomatic Australian, but the whole work has a balance and rhythm which is influenced by what is going on around you. When you first write the narrative it might be unconscious, but when you come to work it over you do it more consciously. It gives what I am writing a greater feeling of reality.

لا يساوره الشك في أن وطنه سيدمره بدلاً من التيقن من أنه سيغيره الى ما يتمناه

كل أمرِ عذب ولين من السهل أن يُجرح