Bryce Courtenay

“Advertising was only meant to be a very small part of my life. I had intended that I would work extensively in journalism for about five or six years and then I'd become a writer.”

“I guess my use-by date is just about up but if I could come back as a storyteller now, I would be jumping over the moon because wow, just think what's available.”

“Storytellers are the keepers - we are the time keepers, the continuity keepers. We are the people who tell us who we are, where we've come from, and maybe even where we're going.”

“I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.”

“If I were king of the world there wouldn't be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.”

“My job, and that's my job, is to dress the naked truth. To make it interesting, to make it viable, to make it seem like something you understand and feel and love.”

“Never take advice from a donkey.”

“Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.”

“I'm going to die with my mind intact. And to me that is the most exciting way you could possibly die.”

“My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.”

“Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.”

“The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.”

“You couldn't lose, you was playing Mozart”

“It's who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone.”

“The imagination is always the best torturer.”

“I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller.”

“What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.”

“Advertising seemed almost natural to me because it was a business where you had to inform, persuade and educate. And so from being a junior copywriter to being the creative director of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country took me 4.5 years, which is, well, a fairly spectacular rise.”

“I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given.”

“People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents.”