Patrick White Quotes (29 Quotes)


    I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.

    My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.

    In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school.

    Conversation is imperative if gaps are to be filled, and old age, it is the last gap but one.

    We believe the land speaks to anyone who goes there and sees the site. It is very moving.


    I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.

    Here I hope to continue living, and while I still have the strength, to people the Australian emptiness in the only way I am able.

    They prevented us from getting that first goal. Had we have gotten that maybe we would have got a little confidence and maybe come back.

    As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains.

    I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I have learnt.

    He was in the cockpit when the plane went down. We're very proud of him and all the folks who made sure our nation's Capitol was not a target. They did not take out a symbol of our democracy.

    Well, good luck to you, kid I'm going to write the Great Australian Novel.

    I dunno,' Arthur said. 'I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I've learnt.'

    Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.

    All my novels are an accumulation of detail. I'm a bit of a bower-bird.

    When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge.

    In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.

    I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.

    I just had a great time out there. When you get chances, you've got to bury them, and I did.

    The failure of The Aunt's Story and the need to learn a language afresh made me wonder whether I should ever write another word.

    Wabash is one of America's greatest liberal arts colleges, rich in tradition and even richer in promise and possibilities. To be chosen to lead Wabash to new heights of achievement as its next president is a great honor.

    Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

    In 1964, submerged by the suburbs reaching farther into the country, we left Castle Hill, and moved into the centre of the city.

    I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood.

    St. Mary's and Wabash are in one important way very different. Wabash is a college for men Saint Mary's, of course, a college for women. But both share a respect for students, a commitment to education of the whole person, and a calling of all students to greatness.

    I have tried to celebrate the park, which means so much to so many of us, in The Eye of the Storm and in some of the shorter novels of The Cockatoos.

    But bombs are unbelievable until they actually fall.

    Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

    During the early, comparatively uneventful months I hovered between London and New York writing too hurriedly a second novel, The Living and the Dead.


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