Thomas Keneally

“Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.”

“But in practice Australia - the pluralism of Australia - sorry the sectarianism to an extent stopped at the time you took your uniform off after coming home from school.”

“But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative.”

“But I was also a brat. I used to belong to a gang that went looking for fights with other gangs.”

“Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.”

“And so um, I knew that I really didn't want to be a priest and didn't want to be a celibate, though I could probably manage it. Um, and um, ultimately I left.”

“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

“I was never any good at cricket thought I love it as a, as a sort of mystery.”

“And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.”

“My brother arrived some months after my father left. Um, and he ah, was thus eight years younger than me and it was um, you know, it was such a time that my mother probably had people wondering was it his.”

“The taste one gets of death in dreams I find more penetrating and atmospheric than the ordinary fear one might suffer while awake.”

“Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular.”

“In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.”

“And I liked pluralist Australia. I got a taste for pluralist Australia. I like, I like Australians and I can't believe that they're going to go to hell because they tell a good dirty joke, you know.”

“Thomas was my true name but everyone knew me as Mick, except my mother, who knew me as definitely Michael.”

“And I was very interested in the priesthood.”

“Australia integrated the - brought on the ships and unleashed in the society the dogs of sectarianism, which had existed in other places - in Glasgow, in Liverpool and of course in Ireland, north and south.”

“You know, so I was a weird eccentric kid but I did believe in the power of the word and of the word being made flesh I suppose, which again I suppose came from my temperament as well as my upbringing.”

“So I remember both medicine, because I frequently sick, particularly with asthma for which there was no proper treatment then, and in religion I had a strong sense of there being a patriarchy.”

“And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.”