As a child, I heard many warnings from teachers about the perils of talking with strangers. Yet now, fairly late in my life, I can think of not many things better than to talk with strangers. The idea of being a stranger is also very appealing.

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.

Art, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy.

It's a consoling notion that death is a very tiny hole, and you need to make yourself very small to get through it. One obviously needs to lighten off, and a rucksack full of bricks or a mantelpiece full of trophies will certainly have to be abandoned - the sooner the better, I say.

The 'economy' became a god such as never before, and a happy, successful society was one that could please this god - sometimes by sacrificing beautiful things - to keep the deity from getting angry and harming the people by withdrawing favours.

If you know anything about ducks, you know a baby duck will imprint itself on you. It misses its mother.

In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.

A world view is probably an expression of self.

Like normal people, leftists now have to get up in the morning and earn a living, seeing as the fascists have come down so hard on social welfare fraud, and this is the cruel reality. The good old days are gone, and increasingly, leftists are to be found working in ordinary, proper jobs.

In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science.

While the world may feel entitled and have the power to pronounce an individual crazy, are there times when the innocent genius, the insightful individual or just the old grandmother may reasonably declare the world to be mad? Probably, but what hope or happiness would such an individual have?

Sadly, semi-consciousness, along with daydreaming, is a capacity that is actively discouraged among children in schools, and our society is much poorer and harsher as a consequence. The value of liminal space and transitional imagination remain personally and culturally undeveloped.

Socialised humanity represses nature and degrades human nature; it takes life and waters it down - probably to control it - diluting existence with water that is lukewarm, sweet and murky.

As a child, I dreamed that my bed could fly and glide and swoop and hover high over the countryside near my home while, snug and secure, I looked down in wonder at the great carpet of life that seemed so perfect beneath me.

Pre-Christmas is very important, and it is stressful, and, you know, even in the biblical story... travelling on the donkey in a stressful environment.

Apparently, the pathfinder duck is a psychological archetype in certain cultures.

I think we live in delusional times, whether it's with a great ability to totally distract ourselves with technology, or with speed and the velocity of life.

All nations that throw their military weight around, occupying neighboring lands and treating the residents with callous and humiliating disregard, are already sliding towards the dark possibilities in human nature.

If you're becoming weary and disillusioned with Australian values, Judeo-Christian values or Western civilisation, I recommend strangers - they're such a glorious, redeeming wilderness to wander into.

Citizens, regardless of their political inclinations, carry a devout sense of their shared culture and its temperament - and, having contributed to it all their lives, hold decent and reasonable hopes for its continued integrity.

Integrity is an ecosystem.

Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.

A beautiful wake-up is one of life's most perfectly happy times.

We might imagine that Jesus had many human faults. He failed most humanly, in my reckoning, when he killed the fig tree just because it didn't bear any figs for his breakfast; that was a disgraceful, bad-tempered thing to do, and to try and make a virtue of it by saying it was a demonstration of faith only made things worse.

Democracy just isn't working any more; without sanity at its heart, it is becoming a most unique and fiendish tyranny.

My father was a meat worker. He was a union organizer in the meat workers union.

Easter is reflecting upon suffering for one thing, but it also reflects upon Jesus and his non compliance in the face of great authority where he holds to his truth - so there's two stories there.

Today, people call each other 'guys' - this derives from Guy Fawkes, the bomb-making terrorist. No greater tribute has ever been paid to anyone in the history of politics.

I've learned to respect the whimsical.

Modern man is probably a more humiliated and depressed creature than he dares to know.

Emotional stability has not been America's gift to the world.

A street full of electric light is a sign of civic failure and is an insulting injury to the soul. Shutting out the night is as disastrous as shutting out the light.

Perhaps the more benign and poetic sense of God is established when we are babies in the moments of primal joy we might call 'the epiphanies of infancy' - the sensation of being blissfully held and feeling complete and at one with everything - yet having no words or no need to say it but instead to just assimilate the feeling.

I'm totally deaf in my right ear, yeah.

An education system suits some more than others. It can lead you out into life or lead you on a wild goose chase. It can help to make you miserable, or dull and nasty and insipid, or profoundly stupid in the special way that 'brainy' people can be.

Every child is a greedy child, I think. I mean, it's healthy to be a greedy child.

I sense that the road to Heaven is paved with dashed hopes.

What a magical thing is the bed, and what a vulnerable, innocent creature is the sleeping human - the human who never looks more truthful or pitiful or benign; the curled-up, childlike dreaming soul who has for a few hours become an angel adrift.

People seem to take as much offence as they possibly can these days - it's almost a new type of greed, a new kind of road rage.

I don't like to brag, but I must tell you that I am regarded in some circles as being in the upper echelons of the elite loony left.

In some ways, calm bodily protest has a nakedness to it that may be deeply embarrassing for observers; an act not unlike the bare-faced Oliver Twist effrontery that stands vulnerably before authority, asking for more or better.

There can be many reasons to travel, but wandering into the world for no particular reason is a sublime madness, which in all its whimsy and pointlessness may depict the story of life - and indeed could be a useful model to keep in mind, seeing as so much of life's ambition comes unstuck or leads to nothing much at all.

All good art is seditious, but the people in authority can never recognise it. I think when you mention sedition, artists are the ones whose eyes light up thinking, 'Oh, yes, I want some of that!'

Avoiding maturity is, for many men, not just a cute hobby, but a life's work - often handsomely rewarded in the infantile popular culture of the West.

Practically every technology that is ever invented is touted as being the new savior, the thing that will bring peace and goodwill to the earth, but immediately it falls into other hands who see it as the opportunity to promote the very opposite.

Humanity hungers for the uncommon.

I had a few ducks as a kid.

There is a central flaw in contemporary culture and a corresponding and related inability to address it. Society seems somehow unable to adequately help or protect itself. Normal citizens feel powerless, isolated and disturbed.

Clever modern man is so witless that he thinks moral silence and empty conscience are an advantage.

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.