Thomas Keneally Quotes

What they could do with 'round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization.

A life lived in chaos is an impossibility.

Nothing is orderly till man takes hold of it. Everything in creation lies around loose.

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

My filing system is messy but orderly.

I always wanted to know what I'd face next, even though that was maybe a bit detrimental to spontaneity. Structuring my life and avoiding chaos was more important.

I can't stand things being out of place.

Generally, my life is absolute chaos, but when I'm writing songs, it's very thought out and regimented.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

Design is important because chaos is so hard.

there must be a routine to life, a framework to hang life on. Routines were what kept you sane, gave you something to do at this moment and at that, definite places to go, positive things to do. Abandon it and that way madness lies.

The closest you will ever come in this life to an orderly universe is a good library.

When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity.

Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.

Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death, it is form, union, plan, it is eternal life, it is happiness.

The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization.

Good order makes men bold, and confusion, cowards.

...chaos doesn't run the whole show.

It takes real planning to organize this kind of chaos.

making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

But my motivation was more a matter of wanting to create order - to keep track of things. All those boxes full of photographs and sketches weigh you down, because they have something unfinished, incomplete, about them. So it's better to present the usable material in an orderly fashion and throw the other stuff away. That's how the Atlas came to be, and I exhibited it a few times.

I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.

I like organizing things. I like organizing my closets, so that I know where everything is. And and I used to color code it.

Order is one of the needs of life which, when it is satisfied, produces a real happiness