What is your favourite word?

Fidelity.

Which human quality do you most admire?

Fidelity.

What is your favourite book?

I can return to any of Nabokov’s books with the confidence that I will at once be interested.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine?

At the moment, my hero is Rimbaud’s self in his Les Illuminations. Who knows who it will be tomorrow? And my heroine? Always Lo.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Boredom and lassitude.

How old were you when your first book appeared?

Fifty-one.

Of which of your books are you fondest?

All writers favour the work in progress. For this work the writer possesses the highest hopes. All the others have failed the dreams that begat them and have been abandoned.

In a phrase, how would you characterise your work?

Storytelling.

Who are your favourite authors?

Proust, Nabokov, Brookner, Roth, Rosenberg, Naipaul,
Musil, Levi, Rimbaud, Duras, Banville, DeLillo,
Kundera, Sebald, Said, Tournier, Bail …

How do you regard publishers?

As business partners.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

Where?

If you had your time again, would you choose to be a writer?

Choice has nothing to do with it.

What do you think of writers festivals?

They reduce me to a state of intense ambivalence.

Do you feel artists are valued in our society?

Far more than in the Union of Myanmar, and far less
than in the Republic of France.

What are you working on now?

A novel based on the life of Sidney Nolan.

Alex Miller is the author of nine novels, the latest being Lovesong (2009), which Allen & Unwin will publish in November. He has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice, for Journey to the Stone Country (2003) and The Ancestor Game (1993); the latter also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Miller was awarded the Manning Clark Cultural Award for an outstanding contribution to the quality of Australian cultural life in 2008.