Status Updates From Barley Patch (Australian Li...

Several times while I was writing the previous pages, I recalled the statement: fiction is the art of suggestion. This statement allows me to suppose that a person without imagination might still succeed in writing fiction so long as his or her reader is able to imagine.

I was almost always aware of the presence behind the line-drawings and the speech-balloons of a person who lived in some or another part of what I called the real world and who struggled continually to imagine.

During the rest of my life I would go on reading from a vast book with no pages, or I would write intricate sentences made up of items other than words.

During all the years while I had been a reader of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction- during those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or anothr fictional character whenever he or she stared past the farthest places mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or her;

The chief character was not easily able to persuade his parents to allow him to go to the Riverina district instead of to university. Whenever his parents reminded him of the benefits to be got from an education at university, the chief character would recite in his mind certain phrases from the poem "The Scholar-Gipsy" by Mathew Arnold.

In time, discussions about the building of several storeys became more detailed. Someone proposed that banquets and orgies should be filmed. This proposal led to plans for a library of films to be set up in the building together with a cinema where the residents could gather on quiet evenings to watch memorable scenes from past orgies.

A hasty reader of the previous pages may still be waiting to learn why I gave up writing fiction more than fifteen years ago. A more careful reader may already be on the way to learning why I gave up.

My own colors, which existed only in my mind against one or another view of one or another image of a racecourse in the background of my mind, were at that time a complicated arrangement of lime-green and royal-blue.

i am only concerned to report that the boy felt from the begining as though his patroness had come to him with the message that she herself, in certain moods, would not despise him and would not report him to his teachers or to the parish priest if it came to her knowledge that he had thought of touching the satin coverings of a tabernacle oe even of trying its door.