Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Keneally

The shock in Keneally's admission isn’t the violence; it’s the quiet, offhand way he files it under character. “But I was also a brat” sets up a disarming self-indictment, then immediately undercuts any cozy, middle-class idea of youthful mischief by specifying a “gang” and a deliberate search for fights. The sentence moves like a confession that refuses the relief of melodrama. No excuses, no origin story, just a blunt ledger entry: I did this.

As a novelist, Keneally knows what that economy buys him. The phrasing nudges the reader to do the moral math: how does someone who later writes with empathy about power, suffering, and moral compromise start out actively seeking conflict? The subtext is not “I was bad,” but “I contain the seed of what I write about.” It’s a miniature study in aggression as social belonging: the gang isn’t incidental; it’s the mechanism that turns teenage aimlessness into purpose, even if the purpose is ugliness.

Context matters too. Born in 1935, Keneally’s youth sits in a postwar culture where masculinity often traveled through toughness, loyalty, and proving grounds that adults half-denied and half-enabled. The line reads like an attempt to puncture the saintly author myth. He isn’t polishing a brand; he’s complicating it. By owning the impulse toward violence, he also claims authority to write about it without pretending he’s always been on the correct side of human nature.