Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.
Don’t mess with the fairies.
What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?
Anything is true if enough people believe it is.
No one else has lived this life.
Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead-ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won’t rhyme. You can be lost in there for hours. Days, even.
There is no God but the one we dream up.
Faust tends not to have happy endings.
Marriage is an anchor, lads. Stops you drifting onto rocks, but stops you voyaging as well.
If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it’s Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aboriginal art were eroding away my will to live. It’s as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald.
Cats seem too transdimensional to get hit by traffic, but it happens all the time.
The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature.
Crazy people are hard work.
I’d learn betrayals came in various shapes and sizes, but to betray someone’s dream is the unforgivable one.
Look at that! Life’s more science-fictiony by the day. It’s not just that you get old and your kids leave; it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.
Think larger. Redraw what is possible.
Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues.
Don’t worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well.
A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.
You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you.