25 Quotes by Robert Dessaix

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative – that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.

It is terribly important to maintain a national identity in a way that it probably wasn’t before.

I think it is an important question of our lives – what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.

One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so – universities are offering degrees for writing novels.

Writers feel that they can’t afford to wait. They must do it now, and they are so clever, and there is so much competition. I’m quite happy to wait, and quite confident that the muses will cross the stream.

The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant. What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

I’ve always had a fascination for the stage which has to do with transfiguration. One moment you are John Smith from East Brighton riding in your cart, and the next moment you are in a completely different world.

I don’t write quickly or a lot. Well actually I write quickly, but I don’t have a store of things. I will wait for that erotic moment – like the one which struck me when someone said “have you ever heard of Kester Berwick?”

It is much easier for me to define what makes a novel French or Russian, but defining the characteristics of an Australian novel are difficult for me as it is all too close – I can’t see the woods for the trees.