Thomas Keneally famous quotes

04-17-2025

It's only when you abandon your ambitions that they become possible.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Art #Ambition #Abandon
Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.
-- Thomas Keneally

#World #Save The World
I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Wisdom #Children #Memories
Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't
-- Thomas Keneally

#Justification
And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Thinking #Design #Church
And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Writing #Mind #Trying
You know, so I was a weird eccentric kid but I did believe in the power of the word and of the word being made flesh I suppose, which again I suppose came from my temperament as well as my upbringing.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Believe #Kids #Flesh
In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Australia #Landscape #Way
And I liked pluralist Australia. I got a taste for pluralist Australia. I like, I like Australians and I can't believe that they're going to go to hell because they tell a good dirty joke, you know.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Believe #Dirty #Australia
And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Church #Literature #World
I was never any good at cricket thought I love it as a, as a sort of mystery.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Mystery #Cricket
Coitus is random, children are definite.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Children
The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Lying #Lists
The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Principles #Surrender #Should
The List is Life.", Schindler's List
-- Thomas Keneally

#Lists #Schindler
I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Wisdom
Though, as he was torn into a pink upper air, she was a good craft to ride in, for her belly was firm and her breasts enabled a flying man good hold and emotions of heady safety. . . . Steering her peasant ***** he bounded off stars.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Stars #Men #Air
Personal finances are like peopleâ€™s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.
-- Thomas Keneally

#People #Finance #Tragic
But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed wasâ€”perhaps rightlyâ€”scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Nice #Reading #Past
Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Mother #Writing #Narrators
So nonetheless given the importance that was placed on sport in Australia, I wanted to be part of that scene, particularly since I had felt very strongly in my early schooling being marginalised even in the Catholic school.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Sports #School #Australia
So I was very close to ordination. I was delighted to be ordained a deacon, which is the last step between, before becoming a priest. But then it all fell apart.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Lasts #Becoming #Steps
Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Christian #Brother #Found
Thomas was my true name but everyone knew me as Mick, except my mother, who knew me as definitely Michael.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Mother #Names
It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of Jesus which hung on Emilie's wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Jesus #Wall #Heart
He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Men #Years #May
But in practice Australia - the pluralism of Australia - sorry the sectarianism to an extent stopped at the time you took your uniform off after coming home from school.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Sorry #School #Home
But I was also a brat. I used to belong to a gang that went looking for fights with other gangs.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Fighting #Gang #Used
And I definitely wanted to be a writer, but I felt a duty now, having used up those educational resources, I felt a duty to the church and my parents to become a priest.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Educational #Parent #Church
Australia integrated the - brought on the ships and unleashed in the society the dogs of sectarianism, which had existed in other places - in Glasgow, in Liverpool and of course in Ireland, north and south.
-- Thomas Keneally

#Dog #Australia #Ships

You may also like:

Bryce Courtenay
Novelist
Christos Tsiolkas
Author
David Malouf
Writer
Emilie Schindler
Fred Schepisi
Film director
Kate Grenville
Author
Kate Morton
Author
Liam Neeson
Actor
Miles Franklin
Writer
Oskar Schindler
Industrialist
Patrick White
Writer
Peter Carey
Novelist
Ralph Fiennes
Actor
Richard Flanagan
Novelist
Robyn Davidson
Writer
Steven Spielberg
Film director
Steven Zaillian
Screenwriter
Tim Winton
Novelist
Timberlake Wertenbaker
Playwright
Janusz Kaminski
Film cinematographer