David Malouf

And I think it was Henry James who first pointed out that you only...

needed at the smallest degree at a glance or what you heard through an open door or what somebody dropped in conversation.

And if you're a writer, that was the kind of first line on a whole page for your way of dealing with experience, whereas it wouldn't necessarily be...

that with someone who was not an active writer.

Oh, fairly late, I think.

You know, as a child, I thought I wanted to be other things.

I was a musician, I played the violin, and I would have liked to be a composer.

I think that was a preoccupation of mine until I was

12 or 13.

After that, I thought I wanted to be an actor and I did a kind of course in acting, you know, out of school hours.

I really discovered I was a writer when I found I had a good many poems as it was then written.

But, you know, by the time I was 15 or 16, I had a typewriter then and

And I was working on a typewriter, writing stories.

And in fact, I won a school prize when I was 12 for a short story I'd written, which was an inaugural prize and was open to anybody of any age in the school.

So it was extraordinary when a 12-year-old in college

The first year of high school kind of won it.

But that didn't necessarily assure me that what I was meant to be was a writer.

But what I'm saying is that I had a certain kind of assurance as a writer, which meant that I would eventually produce things.

And when I had a certain body of work and looked at it,

I could decide that one day perhaps I would be either a poet or a short story writer, fiction writer, although I became a fiction writer quite late, really.