Quotes by Patrick White

About Patrick White:

Patrick Victor Martindale White is widely regarded as one of the most important English-language novelists of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, three short-story collections and eight plays.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

Patrick White

Life is full of alternatives but no choice.

Patrick White

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.

Patrick White

Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of ...

Patrick White

I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken...

Patrick White

The map? I will first make it.

Patrick White

At times his arrogance did resolve itself into simplicity, though it was difficult, especially for strangers, to distinguish these occasions.

Patrick White

He himself, he realized, had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive knowledge in the eyes of mules, ...

Patrick White

His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.

Patrick White

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

Patrick White

I am compelled into this country.

Patrick White

It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fl...

Patrick White

Mrs. Trotter made a sincere though wrong sound, while opening her handbag to look for help.

Patrick White

They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was touched, because he wouldn't have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

Patrick White

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.

Patrick White

In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school.

Patrick White

I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.

Patrick White

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.

Patrick White

I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.

Patrick White

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.

Patrick White

Author Bio

  • NamePatrick White
  • DescriptionEnglish-born Australian writer
  • BornMay 28, 1912
  • DiedSeptember 30, 1990
  • CountryAustralia
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Playwright; Poet; Screenwriter; Autobiographer
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Miles Franklin Literary Award; Order Of Australia