Kate Grenville Quotes

A culture produces ideas which are being explored, which of interest to that culture at that moment. And I think one of the things a writer can do is to take those ideas and go a bit further with them.

A big book is a hard thing to manage – I find the computer makes it easier to keep it in order, and to keep the old drafts (which I sometimes go back to) without drowning in paper.

For years I’ve wanted to write about the Australian countryside, but, like most Australians, I’ve only got a tourist’s knowledge of it. I thought that if I disobeyed that basic rule of writing – write about what you know – I’d write a thin and inauthentic book.

I love to write a book out of questions; in fact, I think it’s the only way my writing can operate, if there’s something I don’t understand.

I think with all my books, language has been their subject as much as anything else. Language can elide or displace or sideline whole groups of people. You can’t necessarily change the way language is used, but if it becomes something you’re conscious of… that gives you a certain power over it.

I think we all waste a lot of time measuring ourselves up against impossible standards in lots of ways. We need to learn a few things, one of which being that physical beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, including a lot that the women’s magazines have never even thought of.

I’m a great believer in the experiential theory of writing.

I love writing fiction – you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

I’ve always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don’t stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it’s all happening at once.

I would never write a sentence that didn’t have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn’t leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn’t be prosaic.

Ebooks have many advantages – publishers don’t have to make guesses about how many books to print, books need never go “out of print”, and hard-to-find books can be easily available. So far, the only limitation seems to be finding a way for the writer to be paid.

The idea of perfection can be a tyrant you should overthrow, to gain your freedom.

Each language has its own take on the world. That’s why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.

I don’t think the physical object of a book has any sacred quality, so in principle I think ebooks are great – just another way for stories and story-tellers to connect.

‘The Secret River’ began because, at the age of 50, I suddenly realised I knew nothing about how my own family had got its foothold in Australia.

When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in ‘Bearded Ladies’ are a little bit experimental.

Australia lives with a strange contradiction – our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.