In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge.

I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.

My childhood was kind of complicated. I have an older sister, but my father, my mother's husband, died when I was four years old. So I only had my mum and sister, really.

I would love to fall in love and get married and have beautiful children. I mean that's one of the goals in life, I think, to have, and it's a beautiful thing. My sister has kids and all my friends have kids. They show me their, you know their report cards. And I can show them my sports car.

Manute Bol taught my family the game of basketball.

I don't like to see projects that are all black or all white. It's how life is. I do like to make sure that I do a nice black family film; that's like keeping my home base. I do other things, but I like to always come back to a positive family film, because of all the negative influences today.