YouSaid · the spoken record

Thomas Keneally

lines on the record: 38
first: 2007-07-22
most recent: 2007-07-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think I'd take the collected place of George Bernard Shaw because not only of the plays fascinating, the stage directions are fascinating, so I think the wit and wisdom of George Bennet Shaw can go a great distance.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought the movie Waking Ned Devine was a little bit cute, but that it had a magnificent soundtrack, including that old Irish song The Parting Glass, and Judy and I have both chosen it. We're going to have Bark and Mozart and so on if we can afford it. We'll have all that, but also the parting glass for the recessional because it's a very gracious sentiment from a comrade who's going home. It's a very gracious sentiment from someone who's just died.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, indeed, and it has been brought to me amongst other things by my grandchildren. I was not expecting to be a dopey grandparent, but something chemical happens to you, and I have found that they've brought an enormous calm to me. I just know I'm on the conveyor belt now. I'm on life's great conveyor belt. I owe it ultimately to the earth to perish.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, if we were not a flawed species we wouldn't be as much fun. If we didn't die and if we were not imperfect and if beauty didn't fade, the novel wouldn't be as interesting. So human imperfection is essential to the novel.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“would be now, but I wasn't when I was young, that's why I went for the big scene. You have a feeling that you won't give away what a nasty narrow little sod you are by writing about big things, but to write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You can't escape revealing yourself whatever you write about.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is from the great film composer John Williams and the great violinist Itsak Pelman and the unjust thing about film music is the first time I saw Schindler with my wife and daughter on the morning of the premiere we were the only occupants of entire theatre in Washington I barely heard the music for the force of what was on screen but Schindler has one of the most glorious soundtracks of any film.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, by fiction is in all sorts of genres, but you've got to choose to take everything as a blessing. I am a little annoyed by that ungrateful young scamp Spielberg, who has not made all my novels into movies as good as Shentler's list, but I am lucky to have any book unknown by. I mean, I'm a boy from the McClay River, and then Homebush. What made me ever think I had anything to write about? And so I look upon it as a kindly challenge to produce something that is so superlative that it will outshind Le Schindler.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and he's also a hero that has one season of grace in his life before the war he was, you know, a local provincial bit of a shyster, bit of a chatter up of women, kind of unreliable, and then he becomes a businessman and a black marketeer, and he loves the black market. He loves having pockets full of diamonds to trade. He loves all that. He doesn't like the dreariness of legitimate business.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean all the best stories are on the Fault lines between races and cultures that love or fraternity across the lines of culture, that love in situations where people have been induced to hate, there's always a great story there, and of course the great aspect of Schindler is that on a human level, on an imaginable level, he reflected, as I said earlier, every aspect of the Holocaust from the dispossession of property, the dispossession of businesses, the ghettoization, the forced labor camps, and the destruction camps.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In october nineteen eighty, when I bought a brief case in a luggage store in Beverly Hills, and because my credit card was held up for about fifty minutes, I got to know the owner who was a very exuberant fellow called Poledeck Fefferberg, and he was a shenler survivor, and he had a Schindler archive at the back, where there were many testimonies and many original documents, including the famous list on which he and his wife were listed.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the next piece of music is from the chieftains and a guest artist, but this is song called Red Is The Rose and I practised as a folky monquet I practised to sing it to my wife the male version on her sixtieth birthday and at the most earnest pleading of my daughters I didn't go ahead. So this now in a good voice is for Judy”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, writing is an exercise in controlling you fear, above all the fear that you're not a writer, and that doubt is always there, but we are addicted to writing. Writing is like dope. It's like alcohol to the alcoholic. You can't do without it, and alcohol makes alcoholics miserable, and writing makes writers sometimes miserable, but writing delivers a sort of transcendence sometimes.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Soon after So I wrote my first novel, but it's interesting that I met my wife through that book because my wife was the night nurse to my mother when she had an operation, and my mother gave it to the night nurse to read, and the night nurse said to her I can't wait to go back to the nurse's station and read your son's book so I had the courage to ask her out.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a wonderful Australian folk song about shearing it's called The Lochlin Tigers and Lochlin Tigers are really top gun shearers from the days when Australia rode on the sheep's back.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I went out to the town of Hay, which is very flatten, very hot, and when it's not hot it's very cold. Its big sheep and cattle country huge properties, and they were tough guys who'd been through World War two, and of course they were profane and earthy and very much at ease with sex when they could get it, you know, they took it when they can get it, and I felt torn because I felt I had to go back to keep faith with the people who'd supported me in the seminary, but I knew in my water that I couldn't go ahead with it.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a bit of a no area, but also to be fair to them I don't think I could have Express myself adequately I am belong to a system that believed if you prayed enough everything could be negotiated. I felt that I had failed in prayer somehow, and I was overwhelmed by sense of failure when I left, and when I was leaving I asked the rector could he say I'd been a good student for six years and he said to me with his dentures clacking Oh the church doesn't give references So I felt absolutely bereft of resources. So I took a job with my uncle in a town named Hayne, and I don't want to sound like a sob sister in talking about what happened then, but I was very low and”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was terrible there was conflict in me. I came across instances of not that I'm a perfect person having been guilty of the same, but institutional lack of charity, particularly to people who left or people who got tuberculosis in there, and some people did get tuberculosis in there in the fifties in a smiling land like Australia, and those people were then let go their parents picked up all the expense of their illness. And similarly with men who went crazy or had breakdowns, and I think in the end I had a breakdown. I think it had probably had a lot to do with sexuality, but I was not aware it was an underground river underneath it all. It was a river that had been sent underground. What I was most aware of was doubts which seemed to be accelerating. It seemed that if I went ahead and got ordained these doubts would accelerate.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's my wife Judy's favourite song Judy is a beautiful and forthright older woman, and she has an equally forthright sidekick called Jan, and between them Judy is the Capa di Cap of Avalon village. I'm sure they collect protection money from all the businesses in town, and Jan is the concilier, and this happens to be the favourite song of both of them.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How it was rather cold for such a warm country, but meal times were sometimes allowed to talk and sometimes we had readings. We never had a woman except the serving nuns in the refictory, and the first woman to enter that refitory was Baroness von Trapp and her strapping daughters, who visited Australia and was such bona fide Catholics with their own chaplain that when they insisted on singing for the seminarians our miserable rector couldn't keep them out about thirty blakes left in the next couple of weeks once they saw Von Trapp's trapping daughters. So that was the first time women sat at the high table of the rectory house.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is true, that is certainly true, and I wanted to be all the priests I admired with the literary ones, the cool ones, and they were my model, but I did believe it the whole package.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The theatricality life was a bit dull, that's the Australia that Clive Jane's escaped from, and the church was very dramatic still, and you could get in contact with Europe through the church.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I was interested in The Latin I was interested in the sacraments, the sacrament of the Mass, the vestments I was interested in all that gear”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I chose the spiritual life, and I got a remarkable education in it was the great age of vocations when many Catholic boys everywhere in the world went into seminaries, even in rough old Australia, and I saw it as a central task. I mean I saw the social working aspects and the cause espousing aspects of the priesthood. I wanted to do good.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is Bacantata, part of which we had for my elder daughter Margaret's wedding, which was a very joyous occasion because we didn't think either of our daughters would come out of the bars long enough together get married. Judy and I have always loved Bark, so Bark had to be at the wedding.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things and certainly do. I mean, That's right, and that tension was always Normouth's, of course, even when I was not conscious of it. I had a mate who was put back a year. He'd been at university and seen those good looking Protestant girls, and he had a huge influence on me too, so I was being torn into.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was that about? Well, there was a brother who's still alive, and blessed be his name, his name was Jimmy McGlade, and he had a collection of modern literature in a locked press like banned books at the back of the classroom, and he would have musical evenings to which any of us go at which he played as Beethoven and Marler and so on, and this opened the sky to me”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, it made a man of you and I never experienced any of the horrors that have come out about the church recently. Indeed, what the Christian brothers did in Australia was that they went into obscure suburbs like Hamwathfield, and they yanked the Irish Australians who were in danger of becoming a bit of an underclass by the bootstraps they thrashed them into the professions in one generation, and they were a great engine when you look at them as a social force. They were a great engine for social equality. And the Christian brothers were saying remain unquestioning Catholic, but make sure you get into the professions and be careful of Protestant girls or agnostic girls. And I noticed even when I'm from thirteen on how many good looking agnostics and heretics there were.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've chosen a song which is an encyclopedia of love alienation and then insult and regret, and I've been married forty years or more so I know about all those the song begins also with the irresistible line Twas Christmas evening in the drunk tank and of course it is an enormously lyrical song by a bloke who can't sing.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it did, and particularly since my little brother would see my mother was pregnant, so I'm impressed with those tough girls. of the depression and the war, and there were similar girls here.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, I do remember the cold night we see him off at Central Station It's a cold night early in the war and they're everyone's weeping and my mother is trying not you know is weeping a bit she's only a young woman and I said I'm trying not to cry Now I said that because it was the sort of thing I saw in the movies little kid said cute things like that so I thought I'm in a movie now so I'd better say the right thing I said I'm trying not to cry and that broke her heart but I was actually quoting from a movie So you know sometimes children aren't as distraught as their words would indicate and sometimes of course they're more distraught.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a very masculine Australia, even though I was an asthmatic I played rugby league and I ran, and I wanted to be the first Nobel laureate who played five eight for the Australian Rugby League team, but I had writing yearnings from my earliest childhood because the books were the only luxury we had, and my mother, who was a girl from the bush, forced books on us, and”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right Yes, I was, and I was intimidated by it as well. We were raised with the idea that all literature occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, so you had to be in the Northern Hemisphere to produce literature. It came in with the finished goods in the ships from Europe, and thus when I began writing I had a strong sense that our job description was to win cricket, participate in foreign wars, and grow wool, but I had a genuine question as to whether Australians could write”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the first piece of music is let me weep, permit me to weep, and it's from Handel's Ronaldo which is one of my favourite operas Handel was the Andrew Lloyd Weber of East A and this is a wonderful ineffable Arya.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I did everything they suggested. For example, Oscar's old girlfriend was now an American granny, and she wanted me to use another name than hers so that her grandchildren never found out what a fast mover she'd been when she was young”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and in particular those who'd been children. The former children were the ones in which the pain was closest to the surface, and I felt that I was messing with wounds that I was intruding on trauma. And that's why all the major characters read the book after I was finished it, which doesn't happen in normal fiction.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also the great benefit which I sensed immediately was that huge human indecencies like Stalin's twenty million or more dead, these huge tragedies are lost by the sheer numbers Stalin himself said one death is a tragedy but a million as a statistic, and Oscar was a lens on every aspect through which he could look and you could see at a human level every aspect of the Holocaust.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and indeed the characters in the book, except for Oscar himself who had deceased. The other characters all read their story and commented on it and made corrections, and so it was a documentary novel, I suppose you could call it. But the controversy was wonderful, it was like being denounced from the pulpit by an archbishop, which is not enough archbishops do that service for literature anymore.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I felt stung by a cattle prod, but a delightful cattle prod. I was delighted that it happened, except that I'd drunk my publisher's cognac as well as my own, because I was convinced I had no chance because the nature of the book, when I received the booker I thanked them for their recklessness.”
2007-07-22 · Desert Island Discs · Thomas Keneally · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source