David Malouf

So I've never wanted to use a computer.

But I also think there's something about the pace at which your hand moves and the pace at which the mind moves.

allows you, when you're writing by hand, to have second thoughts as well as first thoughts.

And I think it all happens so quickly on the computer that sometimes something gets said, and once it's said and in print, it seems good enough.

That is very different from the kind of way your mind and hand work together when you're handwriting.

And so I think for me anyway, the pace at which my mind needs to work when I'm writing, either prose or poetry, is related to the pace at which I can write.

I have had, yes, and they're there because I usually do the first, or did, the first typewritten version, which was pretty untidy, and as I say, I'm not a very good typist, and then it would go to someone who would make a clean typescript for me, and I would begin to correct that.

Well, I would say that.

I would say even more than that, what you have to be is an eavesdropper.

And I think of myself as a small child, being a very, very consistent, but also a very clever eavesdropper.

Because I discovered that very early, I think, but this was mostly in a world of women.

And that's one of the things that you don't always think of, that if you grow up as a child, even as a boy,

you mostly grow up for the first five years in a world of women and I got very very used to listening in to what my mother and her friends were talking about while they had had a cup of tea or played cards or whatever they were doing and I learned from that

that a lot that I was told by my parents or allowed to see and hear by my parents was not the whole story and not the whole truth.

And once I discovered that, that became an obsession, I think, with me.

And I became very, very clever at getting myself into a situation in which I could overhear what people were saying when they thought they were not being listened to.

and other than that I got very used to sort of crawling out of bed and coming and curling up behind an open half-open door in you know the wooden house that we would have lived in in those days where my parents were playing cards with friends or whatever and I got used to overhearing what they said

And I think that was my first training, not to be a writer, but for being a writer.

I think I do, yes.

And look, I think any writer will tell you that they love sitting on a bus and overhearing conversations in that kind of way or something, because a lot of experience comes to you, not directly, but indirectly through observation.