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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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