About Bryce Courtenay: Bryce Courtenay is one of Australia's best-selling authors, notable for his book The Power of One.
I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor.
The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.
Advertising was only meant to be a very small part of my life. I had intended that I would work extensively in journalism for about five or six years and then I'd become a writer.
My job, and that's my job, is to dress the naked truth. To make it interesting, to make it viable, to make it seem like something you understand and feel and love.
I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given.
I'm going to die with my mind intact. And to me that is the most exciting way you could possibly die.
If I were king of the world there wouldn't be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.
I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller.
What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.
My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.
I guess my use-by date is just about up but if I could come back as a storyteller now, I would be jumping over the moon because wow, just think what's available.
I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.
Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.
Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.
It's who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone.
Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.
The only thing that's authentic about what a writer writes is his work.
