And I liked pluralist Australia. I got a taste for pluralist Australia. I like, I like Australians and I can't believe that they're going to go to hell because they tell a good dirty joke, you know.

So nonetheless given the importance that was placed on sport in Australia, I wanted to be part of that scene, particularly since I had felt very strongly in my early schooling being marginalised even in the Catholic school.

And I was very interested in the priesthood.

And I definitely wanted to be a writer, but I felt a duty now, having used up those educational resources, I felt a duty to the church and my parents to become a priest.

So I remember both medicine, because I frequently sick, particularly with asthma for which there was no proper treatment then, and in religion I had a strong sense of there being a patriarchy.

I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.

And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

I was never any good at cricket thought I love it as a, as a sort of mystery.

You know, so I was a weird eccentric kid but I did believe in the power of the word and of the word being made flesh I suppose, which again I suppose came from my temperament as well as my upbringing.

I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did.

So I was very close to ordination. I was delighted to be ordained a deacon, which is the last step between, before becoming a priest. But then it all fell apart.

In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.

My brother arrived some months after my father left. Um, and he ah, was thus eight years younger than me and it was um, you know, it was such a time that my mother probably had people wondering was it his.

And I liked pluralist Australia. I got a taste for pluralist Australia. I like, I like Australians and I can't believe that they're going to go to hell because they tell a good dirty joke, you know.

But I was also a brat. I used to belong to a gang that went looking for fights with other gangs.

Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular.

But in practice Australia - the pluralism of Australia - sorry the sectarianism to an extent stopped at the time you took your uniform off after coming home from school.

Australia integrated the - brought on the ships and unleashed in the society the dogs of sectarianism, which had existed in other places - in Glasgow, in Liverpool and of course in Ireland, north and south.

And so um, I knew that I really didn't want to be a priest and didn't want to be a celibate, though I could probably manage it. Um, and um, ultimately I left.

Thomas was my true name but everyone knew me as Mick, except my mother, who knew me as definitely Michael.

And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.

Personal finances are like peoples personal health crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.

The dogs were really keening now like Irish widows.

Hell, if I'd jumped on all the dames I'm supposed to have jumped on, I'd have had no time to go fishing.

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

A worker's paradise is a consumer's hell.

There's an inherent thing in me where, if things are going too smooth, I'll sabotage the hell out of them, just to make the music more of a sanctuary.

The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?

I just had one of those "what the hell are we doing" moments.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.

Looking back, I think we were all quite mature, surprisingly responsible. In earlier wars, boys of our age had just gone off to raise hell or enlist or both, but we stayed dutifully at our desks doing tomorrow's homework.

As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man.

I would rather my soul broil in hell than I do you any harm.

In Hell all the messages you ever left on answering machines will be played back to you.

I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.

Why? Will no man ever do something without a why? Just like that? For the hell of it?

Our little house was way back in the country. We had one house close to us, and hell the next one would've been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn't nobody hear you.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

Christianity supplies a Hell for the people who disagree with you and a Heaven for your friends.

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

There's nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends who are going to hell.