Patrick White Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We hoped that we could come out and get the first and the energy would pick us up, but they kept getting the bounces.

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.

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

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

We had probably three charges filed in the year and a half the law was in effect ... That roughly indicates the frequency of these offenses.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.

I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.

Life is full of alternatives but no choice.