Robert Dessaix Quotes

#1. 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.

Robert Dessaix

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

Robert Dessaix

#3. 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.

Robert Dessaix

#4. 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.

Robert Dessaix

#5. 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.

Robert Dessaix

#6. 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.

Robert Dessaix

#7. 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.

Robert Dessaix

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

Robert Dessaix

#9. [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.

Robert Dessaix

#10. 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?"

Robert Dessaix

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

Robert Dessaix

#12. 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.

Robert Dessaix

#13. 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.

Robert Dessaix

#14. 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.

Robert Dessaix

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

Robert Dessaix

#16. 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.

Robert Dessaix

#17. 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.

Robert Dessaix

#18. 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.

Robert Dessaix

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

Robert Dessaix

#20. 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.

Robert Dessaix