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Quotes From Here And There

Albert Einstein
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.
Dylan Thomas
I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.
Eddie Cantor
It takes twenty years to become an overnight success.
Edward Abbey
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
e e cummings
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
Eyler Coates
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually produce a masterpiece. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Without music, life would be a mistake.
Gustave Flaubert
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Going to the Opera is like making love; we get bored but we come back.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If I love you, what business is it of yours?
John Steinbeck
Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.
Leonard Cohen
Ring the bells that still can ring;
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything;
That's how the light gets in.
Montaigne
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
Paul Sweeney
You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
Peter Altenberg
I never dreamed of being Shakespeare or Goethe, and I never expected to hold the great mirror of truth up before the world; I dreamed only of being a little pocket mirror, the sort that a woman can carry in her purse; one that reflects small blemishes, and some great beauties, when held close enough to the heart.
Robert Frost
In three words, I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money.
Satchel Paige
Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.
Thomas Mann
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
V S Naipaul
The writer has only to listen very carefully and with a clear heart to what people say to him, and ask the next question, and the next.

My Personal Library


Winner Of The First Australia-Asia Literary Award

"There's a huge change coming very fast and this prize is giving a glimpse of that future." Nury Vittachi, judge and founding board member of the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership.

DAVID MALOUF has won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award for his short story collection The Complete Stories.

The AU$110,000 award, which was created by the former Labor government in Western Australia, is worth AU$10,000 more than the next richest, the Prime Minister's Literary Award, and is given for fiction by writers resident in, or outside Australia, writing primarily about Australia or Asia.

Malouf was "very pleased to be the first recipient". He welcomed the award, and praised it as unique among state literary prizes.

"There is certainly no other literary prize where Australia is the initiator which takes in Asia like this does, so it's a very good thing that we're looking outwards rather than inwards as we tend to do" he said.

The Complete Stories won from a very strong shortlist, including The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize), The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser (longlisted for the Booker), Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey, and Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital.

The longlist, culled from 111 entries, also had plenty of dazzle, including the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee (Diary Of A Bad Year), Haruki Murakami (After Dark), Rodney Hall (Love Without Hope) and Alex Miller (Landscape Of Farewell).

"It's a wonderful piece of writing, a combination of decades of work, and it captures the human condition in such a deep and intense way," said Nury Vittachi, a member of the judging panel, along with the Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie, and the Australian critic Peter Craven. Vittachi is also a founding board member of the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership.

"His characters are very ordinary people and he captures the intense joys and sadness of ordinary life."

Vittachi agreed the decision to award the prize to a book of short stories was unusual.

"It might usually go to a novel. But there's an ancient story form called a bracelet, where you have a sequence of stand-alone stories which when read together have as much power as a single, united novel. We thought this book worked as just such a bracelet."

Vittachi sees the award as a means to divine the region's literary future.

"This award is special as it has a focus on a particular region, a region where there are 4 billion people," Vittachi said.

"The future of our cultural entertainment will be here. We're looking for a new Asia-Pacific flavour, as that is a good pointer to what the new literature will be. There's a huge change coming very fast and this prize is giving a glimpse of that future."

Malouf said he hoped "booksellers, publishers and the media get behind the prize in the way they do for the Miles Franklin Award".

Australia-Asia Literary Award Shortlist

  • Michelle DE KRETSER The Lost Dog Publisher: Allen & Unwin
  • Mohsin HAMID The Reluctant Fundamentalist Publisher: Penguin
  • David MALOUF The Complete Stories Publisher: Random House
  • Ceridwen DOVEY Blood Kin Publisher: Atlantic Books
  • Janette TURNER HOSPITAL Orpheus Lost Publisher: HarperCollins

Australia-Asia Literary Award Longlist

  • J.M. COETZEE Diary of a Bad Year Publisher: Random House Group Ltd
  • Matthew CONDON The Trout Opera Publisher: Random House (Vintage)
  • Michelle DE KRETSER The Lost Dog Publisher: Allen & Unwin
  • Ceridwen DOVEY Blood Kin Publisher: Atlantic Books
  • Rodney HALL Love without Hope Publisher: Pan Macmillan
  • Mohsin HAMID The Reluctant Fundamentalist Publisher: Penguin
  • Mireille JUCHAU Burning In Giramondo Publishing
  • David MALOUF The Complete Stories Publisher: Random House
  • Alex MILLER Landscape of Farewell Publisher: Allen & Unwin
  • Haruki MURAKAMI After Dark Translator: Jay Rubin Publisher: Random House Group
  • Indra SINHA Animal’s People Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
  • Janette TURNER HOSPITAL Orpheus Lost Publisher: HarperCollins
-from The Sydney Morning Herald, November 22, 2008.

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