Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.

I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

I get more optimistic as I get older.

I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.

I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are.

Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.

I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.

You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.

If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.

Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.

I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.

My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew.

I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.

I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.

Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you to say all those things.

The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.

I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.

What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.

A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.

I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.

I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.

The only accusation of Gillian Triggs with the ring of truth is that she has lost the confidence of the government - but then, so too has Tony Abbott.

Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.

The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.

Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.

We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.

What is needed to pass gay marriage is not a Democratic majority - this past year has proven that to be true - but politicians and judges comfortable enough to ignore what the majority of the voters want and do what is uncomfortable, unpopular - and morally right.

Equal rights should not be debatable and certainly should not be put to a vote of the people. Would we ask the electorate to vote on whether or not Catholics and Protestants should marry? Of course we would not.

One sure way to ruin American credibility in the Arab world is to sit silently in Damascus and look like you're part of the Assad show.

China understands economics more than most countries and is usually moved to increase freedoms when the yuan is directly involved.

Every once in a while, brave companies step out and act in ways that move customers and shareholders to also act in good faith.

Federal employees are public servants, not partisan foot soldiers for President Obama, and shouldn't have to decide whether a partisan White House request can be ignored without consequences.

Most people in Washington assumed if Obama made it to the White House he would appoint Biden as his secretary of state, a position Biden openly admitted he wanted.

While American interests in the Middle East must obviously be protected, America's credibility to support democracy for everyone everywhere is crucial.