Robert Dessaix quotes:

The Odyssey and Iliad say things about the human condition in ways we should re-acquaint ourselves with, and use as a prism to interpret though.

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

You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.

I think that in this globalised world, the local is going to become more and more important - it is a paradox. You see it in Western Europe more and more. Eastern Europe is still coming out of the Soviet uniform cultural era, but this kind of separation and nationalism is very obvious now in Western Europe.

I did spend about 5 years in the Griffin Theatre Company in 1978 actually , and worked therefore about 5 years on a voluntary basis. This was very much as a amateur, doing things like mopping the floor, handling props, setting up scenery, etc. I never acted, and don't think I'm an actor, but those years in the theatre taught me a lot about professional theatre.

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You are obviously writing out of experience and so the boundaries are always blurred, it is just that sometimes it would seem that you are playing with fire a little bit by choosing someone that obviously existed.

A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

Despite the war, and bombings, and all the big things that happen to us, the stuff of our lives is small and always will be. During a war it is different, but even then, it is perfectly possible to write novels during a major war, which are about those thing which endure. It is what makes us human and the thing which is going to keep going.

Every time you watch a performance in the theatre, you know that this is just for you, and will never be the same again. It is quite exciting for me.

I am coming from an older school, and I feel that you must learn to wait. There is that essay which was about the great notion of sitting on the mountain and waiting for the muses to cross the stream, and give you the symbols that would allow you to create. The word wait seems to me to be terribly important.

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?"

I think that a lot of people do have a physical Ithaca, but I don't think that I do and I think that a lot of people do not. This depends on your values and the circumstances of your life. My Ithaca is in the Mental realm and this doesn't mean that you don't have to go back to it.

I want to write the sort the book that my people want to read, even if the market is small.

In the theatre, you are in love with what is on the stage, with the moment. You just don't get that with movies or videos, or TV, where you know that what you are seeing is repeatable.

One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.

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.

There is a mental space that we consciously makes our way back to, and give honour to what has formed us in this mental homeland which we carry with us always. It is important not to try to annihilate it but to take your courage in your hands and go back, and then I think you can more easily make a new beginning. A lot of us would like to know how to do this.

When I re-read the Odyssey, it felt like I was reading PD James or Minette Walters - you feel that you are sharing in something that hundreds of millions of people have read with love, and I think that this is worth holding onto. It is not a matter of canonical texts or elitism, which the universities are trying to make us wary about. It is about shared language and metaphor and experience and imagery and that is all good.

Wonder - the sensation of being whisked out of time and space...to be bathed in ... epiphanous delight.