Patrick White
Patrick White
Patrick Victor Martindale Whitewas an Australian writer who is widely regarded as one of the most important English-language novelists of the 20th century. From 1935 to his death, he published 12 novels, three short-story collections and eight plays...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 May 1912
CountryAustralia
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As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains.
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Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.
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I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.
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Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
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In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.
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My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.
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Life is full of alternatives but no choice.
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If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.
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Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.
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She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.
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I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.
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She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.
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We had probably three charges filed in the year and a half the law was in effect ... That roughly indicates the frequency of these offenses.
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We hoped that we could come out and get the first and the energy would pick us up, but they kept getting the bounces.