Thea Astley

I'm still an apprentice at writing. I'd be doomed if 1 thought otherwise. Nobody's work improves unless they're pretty humbly aware of its failings ... I love the English language - it offers the most beautiful smorgasbord. It's an inexhaust· ible smorgasbord ... Symbols? I don't know. Anything can be a symbol. Was Moby Dick a symbol - a huge penis in the Atlantic? Many pe~ple have speculated on suffering as being an impetus to the creative instinct. Similar to being a Catholic perhaps, with Catholicism's early emphases on the nature of guilt, damnation, eternal punishment, the beauty of suffering (not involuntarily but voluntarily), being a Q.ueenslander in Australia provides much in the nature of achieving possible apotheosis