There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

An education system suits some more than others. It can lead you out into life or lead you on a wild goose chase. It can help to make you miserable, or dull and nasty and insipid, or profoundly stupid in the special way that 'brainy' people can be.

In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.

A street full of electric light is a sign of civic failure and is an insulting injury to the soul. Shutting out the night is as disastrous as shutting out the light.

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.

It is known that wildfires behave unpredictably - this is fundamental - but it is my experience that humans in the presence of wildfire are also likely to behave in aberrant and unpredictable ways.

A good memory is surely a compost heap that converts experience to wisdom, creativity, or dottiness; not that these things are of much earthly value, but at least they may keep you amused when the world is keeping you locked away or shutting you out.

I've learned to respect the whimsical.

It's a consoling notion that death is a very tiny hole, and you need to make yourself very small to get through it. One obviously needs to lighten off, and a rucksack full of bricks or a mantelpiece full of trophies will certainly have to be abandoned - the sooner the better, I say.

Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.

There can be many reasons to travel, but wandering into the world for no particular reason is a sublime madness, which in all its whimsy and pointlessness may depict the story of life - and indeed could be a useful model to keep in mind, seeing as so much of life's ambition comes unstuck or leads to nothing much at all.

Wisdom may best arise from a humbling reality.

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

What modern humans need help with is escaping from the despair of politics, commerce and media, escaping from the drabness and oppressiveness of worldly values and seeing through suburban mentality and normal community standards so that they can find some much-needed relief for their wilting souls.

Today, people call each other 'guys' - this derives from Guy Fawkes, the bomb-making terrorist. No greater tribute has ever been paid to anyone in the history of politics.

The hypocrisy of some is that we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and evolved, but we're still also driven by primal urges like greed and power.

The insatiable need for heartless power and ruthless control is the telltale sign of an uninitiated man - the most irresponsible, incompetent and destructive force on earth.

Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'

Sadly, semi-consciousness, along with daydreaming, is a capacity that is actively discouraged among children in schools, and our society is much poorer and harsher as a consequence. The value of liminal space and transitional imagination remain personally and culturally undeveloped.

We might imagine that Jesus had many human faults. He failed most humanly, in my reckoning, when he killed the fig tree just because it didn't bear any figs for his breakfast; that was a disgraceful, bad-tempered thing to do, and to try and make a virtue of it by saying it was a demonstration of faith only made things worse.

There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would imagine because I think it's the body where the imagination lives somehow. I do feel the imagination isn't just in the brain up there.

When I was a boy, my own dad told me in a smiling and wistful way that it's a wise man that knows his own father.