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"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."
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"Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country."
"The nation can no longer afford to continue policies that hasten the flight of persons to the distant suburbs."
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"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."
"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."
"I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table."
"When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge."
"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."
"In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature."
"I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels."
"Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man."
"My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage."
"I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on."
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