Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.

Simplicity, clarity, singleness: these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.

Oh wearisome condition of humanity! / Born under one law, to another bound: / Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity; / Created sick, commanded to be sound.

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

Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.