Writing is intoxicating – an addictive exercise. At literary festivals, writers carry on about the solitude of it, but really it is a ridiculous enterprise. The problem is, like with dying and childbirth, you can't hire anyone else to do it.
There is nothing like the fulfilment of spending a day with a child. A child doesn't give a bugger whether you are working well or not. When in doubt, take out a child. I've got four grandchildren between the ages of four and 12, and I use them for therapy.
Schindler's Ark was very different from most of my other books in style, but it seemed to me that was the way to tell it. You do feel there are neglected runts in your litter who deserve equal weight, but then to have a lustrous child is better than to have no lustrous children at all.
It's OK to be one of those stupid, old, geriatric males who have a debate with the television. There are many areas on which I disagree with Julia Gillard, the Australian prime minister – but the other day, when she got stuck into Tony Abbott for sexism, I was all: "You go, girl!", like an American.
I have always been the sort of bloke who gravitates to the women at a party. I don't want to talk about cars or real-estate prices. I think it's because I was raised in such a macho society.
I am a talker rather than a doer. In Nazi Germany, in those extreme situations, I would have probably said: "This is appalling, but what can one do?" And that is why I have become something of an activist.
You can't profit from a book like Schindler and then allow your own country to have detention centres, can you?
In the late 50s and the 60s we believed that all culture was in the west and that you guys were reading Thomas Hardy and George Eliot and Milton continuously – whereas in fact you were in pubs. We read everything to compensate for the fact we were so far away and felt that strange antipodean complex of superiority and inferiority.
Everything you need to know about the connections between humans and demi-gods is down there in the subconscious – this is my cut-price Jungian theory. And writing is the sort of process that brings out those connections. With the conscious application of craft, things just pop up. It is like solving a cryptic-crossword clue.
In my life there are three layers of rejection: publisher, reviewer, and then public. You need arrogance to write a novel, but it is double edged.
By now I know the world does not need my books, but I definitely still need them. I have lived long enough to know I am hugely lucky to have got away with it.
Fiction was king. Now it isn't.
The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally (£18.99, Sceptre) is out now
