Patrick White Quotes

‘As Australia is the only country I really know in my bones, it had to be set in Australia” – PW on Voss (letter to Huebsch)

“I don’t think I have learn to accept Australia but to endure it.” (Letters 413)

“From time to time I have to protest against various awful aspects of Australian life; even those serve a purpose, I think, providing the kind of irritant I need creatively” (457)

“It is not that I am not Australian. I am an anachronism, something left over from that period when people were no longer English and not yet indigenous.” (Letters 288)

“A Londoner is what I think I am at heart but my blood is Australian and that’s what gets me going.” (536)

“We shall never be anything of a nation because we are too bloody greedy and too bloody stupid” (578, in light of the Dismissal).

To TV cameras on the day before the Bicentenary: “Circuses don’t solve serious problems. When the tents are taken down, we’ll be left with the dark, the emptiness – and probably a two-dollar loaf.” (634)

“It is not that I am not Australian. I am an anachronism, something left over from that period when people were no longer English and not yet indigenous.” (Marr 11)

“Visitors from overseas will not be impressed by a mediocre Bonnard, an atypical Braque, or an unimportant Picasso. Let us give them the unexpected pleasure of discovering something they are not yet likely to see anywhere else.” (PWC exhibition catalogue, on the importance of galleries prioritising Australian art.)

“I pray that we may act honourably at home and abroad, that our Aborigines receive the justice owing to them, that black and white live together in harmony, that we may concentrate, without further shilly-shally, on the vital projects of soil and water conservation, and that we may open the eyes of increasing numbers of our fellow countrymen to the universal issues of nuclear disarmament and peace.” – from Imagining the Real

“Spending such a fortune on SPORT… when we haven’t enough hospitals, schools, poverty is increasing every month, we have done hardly anything for the Aborigines and our art gallery and museum are miserable makeshift affairs” (508)

PW on life at Dogwoods and Oz in general: “I am rooted so deeply I doubt I shall ever be able to pull free.” (Letters 88)

PW: “I know that a great many ignorant native-born Australians (and nothing can be more ignorant than certain native-born Australians) go out of their way to encourage New Australians to drop their own standards in favour of the dreary semi-culture which exists here at present. However, there are also a great number of civilised Old Australians who are hoping that the migrants from European countries will bring something of their own cultures with them, so that we can incorporate them into what will some day be a true civilisation of our own.” (369)

“I always like to write three versions of a book. The first is always agony and chaos; no one could understand it. With the second you get the shape, it’s more or less all right. I write both of those in longhand. The third draft I type out with two fingers: it’s for refining of meaning, additions and subtractions. I think my novels usually begin with characters; you have them floating about in your head and it may be years before they get together in a situation. Characters interest me more than situations. I don’t think any of my books have what you call plots.” – In the Making

“My downfall is that I become interested in characters and want to explore each one of them too thoroughly.” (Marr 153)

“I find it increasingly hard to convey ordinary objects (a telephone, say), or necessary moves (from one room to another) without being overwhelmed by the banality they have in everyday life.” (Letters 391)

“I think one really has to be a bitch and a gossip to succeed at fiction.” (352)

“There is something a bit dishonest about the short story, just as there is about a play.” (400)

In response to complaints about Australian lingo in US editions: “There is a lot in the American language I have had to puzzle out for myself and am none the worse for doing so. Why can’t the American do the same when it comes to ours?” (433)

“Sentimentality is the enemy of Art” (Quoted in Armfield 2012)

“For me, a comma is a piece of sculpture” (436)

PW in W.H. Smith essay 1959: “I don’t write for love, but because my writing seems to be a disease from which there is no cure.

PW: “Well, there it is, the same awful muddle as usual, which somehow, one prays, will turn into a novel” (397)

“Always something of a frustrated painter, and a composer manqué, I wanted to give my book the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint…Above all I was determined to prove that the Australian novel is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalist realism.” (Prodigal Son)

“It has always troubled me that so many Australian novelists are content to explore an autobiographical vein instead of launching into that admittedly disturbing marriage between life and imagination – like many actual marriages in fact – all the risks, the recurring despair, and rewards if you are lucky.” (Truth and Fiction)

“There will be the usual outcry from those who expect a novel to be a string of pedestrian facts…”

“The realistic novel is remote from art. A novel should heighten life, should give one an illuminating experience; it shouldn’t set out what you know already,” – In the Making

“My flawed self has only ever felt intensely alive in the fictions I create” (PWS)

“Haste is disastrous to fiction and cookery” (462)

“One’s characters are part of one’s unconscious but they do take control and you haven’t much say in the matter.” (495)

“The longer I live the more difficult I find it to read fiction, unless it is something I know from experience to be of value” (Letters 274)

“Of course, all artists are terrible egoists. Unconsciously you are largely writing about yourself. I could never write anything factual; I only have confidence in myself whem I am another character. All the characters in my books are myself, but they are a kind of disguse.” – In the Making

”I am constantly meeting ladies who say ‘how lovely it must be to write’ – as though one sat down at the escritoire after breakfast, and it poured out like a succession of bread-and-butter letters, instead of being dragged out, by tongs, a bloody mess, in the small hours. (Letters 291)

“Sometimes if I become very depressed while writing a novel and I get an idea for a short story I get that down, and afterwards I feel as though I have been liberated somehow” – In the Making

PW on his own insight, gained from his feeling of otherness and his homosexuality: “I recognised the freedom being conferred on me to range through every variation of the human mind, to play so many roles in so many contradictory envelopes of flesh” (582)

Helen Blaxland (old lady): “You know, Patrick, I find our books awfully hard to read.”
Patrick White: “And I find them awfully hard to write.” (Letters 455)

PW to editor Ben Huebsch during the Suez Crisis and Menzies: “It is difficult to concentrate for the stink of history just at present.

“Let me be around when the Australian Republic is proclaimed so that I can fly the Eureka flag above my garden. Whatever the dangers we may have to face in the future, let us face them honourably and as ourselves.” (A new Constitution)

“At every level of the power structure we are missing our chances to create a great independent democracy of the South. Everything is done to distract our attention from reality – through royal weddings, titles, the advertising of unnecessary goods, expensive cars, the soporific thud of the cricket ball, gladiatorial displays by steak-fed footballers…Reality is the rape of this country for its mineral wealth regardless of the shambles we’ll be left in when foreign interests are appeased and the dollars blown.” (State of the Colony)

“Faith is something between the person and God, and must vary its forms accordingly.”

“I suppose what I am increasingly intent on trying to do in my books is to give professed unbelievers glimpses of their own unprofessed faith.” (Letters 363)

RELIGION: Yes, that’s behind all my books. What I am interested in is the relationship between the blundering human being and God. I belong to no church, but I have a religious faith; it’s an attempt to express that, among other things, that I try to do. – In The Making

“Dear Father Xmas, Will you please bring me a pistol, a mouth organ, a violin, a butterfly net, Robinson Cruso, History of Australia, a little mouse what runs across the room. I hope you do not think I am too greedy but I want the things badly, your loving Paddy.” (Marr 38; Xmas 1918)

To the tooth fairy: “Dear Fairies, would you give me a book I don’t mind what kind it is can I have it on my birthday it is on the 28^th of May. I hope you will have a nice danse tonight I expect you have tea on the toad stools at night Do you live in the flowers. Could you please make it rain in the country soon it is very dry up there the sheep and cattle are dieing. And would you make the influenza better I wish you would with love from Paddy.” (Marr 42, c. 1919)

[both of the above printed in the SMH 10/11/1990]

PW, angry about people saying “let’s just remain ordinary Australians”… “That hateful religion of ordinariness.” (368)

PW: “I do feel that every minute of my life has been necessary – though this conviction has only recently come to me – and that the sum total can only be good, though how good one cannot presume to say (Letter 1952)

A favourite PW phrase: “It won’t all be violets.”

“I haven’t been a happy person. Oh I’ve had wonderful bursts of happiness. But how can anyone who thinks or sees what goes on be happy?… Turn a blind life and you could lead a wonderful life.” (625)

Re: Manoly Lascaris – “I am so lucky to have found him, and that it has lasted twenty-six years in spite of me” (527)

“The trouble is I can never forgive mediocrity in anyone. I’d almost rather have a positive, flashy badness.”

“ I have never been one to sit and smile sweetly when there was an offending eye to spit in.” (Marr 392)

PW on refusing to teach at universities: “Those who will understand my books will do so intuitively. I don’t want to waste time on the others.” (Marr 347)

PW on accepting his genetics: “Blood is the river which cannot be crossed” (599)

“Any literary reputation that can’t stand up to the truth isn’t worth having.” (Letters 542)

“For me, the pavement and the crowd. You’ve got to have something to fight against; otherwise you’ll die of bush ballads.” (595)

“If I am anything of a writer it is through my homosexuality, which has given me additional insights, and through a very strong vein of vulgarity” [i.e. stop calling me an aristocrat, people] (602)

He once called two female critics (Leonie Kramer and Dorothy Green) “the Goneril and Regan of Australian letters” although he came to like Green (Letters 560)

On Mandala: “I tried to write a book about saints, but saints are few and far between… But I am a sensual and irritable human being. Certainly the longer I live the less I see to like in the human beings of whom I am one.” (453)

“The sentimental cult of the amateur by Those Who Know Best is one of several reasons why we have been held back in the arts, especially the art of theatre.” (Letter to SMH 2/11/1974)

PW when being presented with the Miles Franklin Award in 1958: “I am going to buy a hi-fi set… and a kitchen stove”.

Money is “the poison which infects and destroys all advanced societies. The money, which dazzles those who manufacture armaments, deluded scientists, and politicians. Humility should be the antidote.” (612)

Re: Clive James – “I must say it is a little galling to be dismissed by somebody whose hero is Scott Fitzgerald but perhaps that is something one should expect from an Australian who is also the Perennial Undergraduate.”

“I have derived immense comfort, hope, faith, inspiration from a great American, the Cistercian monk-teacher-activist Thomas Merton. Initially a contemplative religious, Merton’s spiritual drive was aimed at halting the dehumanization of man in contemporary society, a sickness he saw as leading to mass violence and ultimately nuclear war. War of any kind is abhorrent. Remember that since the end of World War II, over 40 million people have been killed by conventional weapons. So, if we should succeed in averting nuclear war, we must not let ourselves be sold the alternative of conventional weapons for killing our fellow men. We must cure ourselves of the habit of war.” (Australians in a Nuclear War)

“When I tell them I don’t know the answers, I’ve got to admit I’m not being strictly truthful. I do, or I have known them, and shall again, but only intermittently, the result of a daily wrestling match, and then only by glimmers, as through a veil. None of the great truths can be more than half-grasped.” (Australians in a Nuclear War)

“As for novels I don’t think Australians will be reading them by the end of the century, so I have wasted my life and would have done better learning to cook properly in the beginning. Whatever happens, people will always need to be cooked for” (1981, Letter 548)

White’s prayer, found on a scrap of 1988 diary in his 2006 papers:
‘‘May I be guided in the coming year in my efforts to unite people, through the written and the spoken word, that we may abandon despair and apathy for a fresh belief in spiritual progress and universal peace.’’”

“In a deeply felt personal relationship, it is possible to experience emotionally all that one never has, and perhaps never will experience in life. This is the answer to people who say to the novelist: how did you know about something you haven’t experienced yourself?” – Notebooks

Dorothy Green (from obituary in the Independent 1990): “White was “the voice of [the] country’s conscience”

‘One learns to read White by re-reading his texts.’ – Alan Lawson, Patrick White: Selected Writings

“People are writing in short sentences now” – agent to PW on trying to shop his first manuscript (Happy Valley) in 1937.

Manoly Lascaris: “Patrick can’t be judged as others are, you can’t use the same weights and measures, because out of this comes his work.” (Marr 357)

PW’s former friend Klari Daniel: “He squeezes you out like a lemon and when it is dry he turns to someone else.”

Marr on Happy Valley: “Each will suffer, but not alone. White was always on the side of couples. Anything is better than loneliness.” (154)

“A country is only remembered for its art. Rome is remembered for Virgil, Greece for Homer, and Australia may be remembered for Patrick White.” – Anthony Burgess, Adelaide Festival 1970..

“TRUTH IS GREAT AND SHALL PREVAIL” – Telegram from Huebsch to PW after he won the Miles Franklin despite middling Australian reviews.

Manning Clark: “There are from time to time human beings who have taken such a huge bite at the fruit of the tree of knowledge that they have become gods. Patrick White was one of them.”

Manning Clark said PW had “the face of a man who wants something he is never going to get.. something possibly no human being can give him” (Marr 354)

Elizabeth Kirkby: “To read Patrick White is to go body-surfing on waves of words. Even if you can’t handle the current of power and passion and are ‘dumped’; to ride the wave is an experience never to be forgotten.”

Elizabeth Jolley: PW was “thought-provoking and entertaining, sets us, speculating, adrift – forcing us to think for ourselves.”

W.J. Hudson: “He paid us the compliment of telling us in his own tones and his own language how we might do better. He did not patronise us by pretending to be at least a bit like the rest of us, and we cannot patronise him by seeing him merely as a sign of contradiction. Nor has his impact really come from his preaching, scarifying as that was at times. He affected us by being Patrick White.”

Nicholas Hasluck quotes a friend: “one of the most important events of the post-war era… was the fact that Patrick White chose to come back to his native land.”

Artur Lundkvist: “As far as one can judge from a distance, Patrick White has done something unique for Australian literature. He has given it a style, a flexible and characteristic form of expression, in short, something of a language of its own. For Australia has long been one of the relatively voiceless countries unable to articulate its innermost problems, its own outlook on life. In this respect, the effects of British colonisation have been prolonged.”

“This may be the end of me, but it has to be.” – Manoly, on taking the decision in 1941 to form a relationship with this often emotional writer.

Manning Clark told Humphrey McQueen that PW was “the great liberator” whose novels inspired him to begin his History “as a clash of belief systems.” (ABR obituary 1990)

Thomas Keneally: “It’s tough being a genius, but also tough to be an antipodean Elijah, tormented by the imperfections of the society, hurling severe arrows of lightning down on our heads. Thus, we Aussie punters could never quite love him. But, by God, his work still richly deserves our respect.” (Guardian, 16/11/2002)

Salman Rushdie regarding Voss: “I cannot think when last a book so moved me, or showed me so very much. You have taken my breath away, and I’m grateful for it.” (Private letter, 9 January 1985, Papers of Patrick White, MS 9982, Series 1, Folder 49)

Shirley Hazzard: “‘As with all important novelists whose testimony implicates their native land, the fact that Patrick White is Australian is, from the literary standpoint, both essential and irrelevant.’”