Established authors often speak of the ‘coldness’ of novelists, a coldness purported to be necessary for the documenting process. Amis is not enthralled by the topic, narrows his pale eyes, lights another cigarette, and smokes it for a minute before speaking. ‘You’re certainly not one removed from your emotions, but a fraction of a removal away. You do have this sort of vampiric attitude to experience.'

- MARTIN AMIS

'Tough Girl Lou' (as her husband calls her) marches out from the bedroom and announces that she has to leave for a meeting. Her walk is something between that of a nicely brought-up girl and an SS officer … Above all, Lou likes to wear heels. When Tough Boy James was being photographed for this story in the dunes of Sydney’s Kurnell, Lou stood there like a sentinel, her heels slowly sinking into the sand.

- JAMES BLUNDELL

She runs a red-gloved finger over his buttocks. John shifts and murmurs to her. She removes her glove and pats his buttocks before bringing her open palm over them lightly, ten times. He thanks her. He cannot see her face above him, which is sickened and false. ‘You wouldn’t want to make me angry, now, would you?’ She whispers, caressing him. ‘I can be very angry; very, very angry. You know that, don’t you?'

- BONDAGE & DISCIPLINE MISTRESSES

‘I find everything beautiful, everything,’ he says. ‘I am very much against the notion that for something to be beautiful, it has to be in a frame in an art gallery with someone reviewing it. Beauty may be the elegance of a mathematical solution, it can be a Penthouse centrefold, design, a rainy day … anything.’

- EDWARD DE BONO

Allen suddenly slices a straight line down the woman’s chest with his scalpel, through the plastic. A jewel-bright bar of blood bubbles up. the sticky plastic holds the skin in place. He begins burning the slight aperture with an electrosurgical generator - a bolt of energy which cauterizes bleeding vessels. His face is calm. The fumes rising from the flesh are thick and foul and curl into the faces of those watching. Burning flesh has the stench of burning rubber, burning hair.

- CARDIOTHORACIC SURGEONS

‘I’m not really interested in the audience’s enjoyment,’ Cave mumbles once he has changed into his clean trousers. ‘It doesn’t bother me one way or another. I just don’t give a shit. People feel more and more disappointed with each concert because less and less happens. It’s really easy to suck an audience in. like I can wiggle my bum and backflip on my head and they love it. I could make an audience love me until the end of my days. There’s no point in it any more. I wish they’d just … die.’

- NICK CAVE

'Acting with me is never fake,’ he concedes after a numbing lull. ‘The screen kiss, and to play normal people - those are the hardest things to do. To play a killer is very easy because you have to do something - you have to kill. But when you play a character who has nothing to do … a love story, for example, that is very hard. I can’t judge myself. I just push the emotion at the right moment. You work the emotion, like when I cut my cock off in The Last Woman … have you seen The Last Woman? Great movie.’

- GERARD DEPARDIEU

'My father hit me,’ he says, his voice clear and very low. ‘He probably hurt me at the time. I was a pretty small kid, and he was a tall guy, over six feet. I’m not stressing that I seriously deserved it, but I can understand it because I’m a pretty … nervy person myself. I can see how someone can feel pushed. I was once punished for something I didn't do, and that made me angry.'

- ALEX DIMITRIADES

'The divorce was … scary. It was definitely scary. Scary because if you were married as young as I was - 20 years old - it’s like you don’t know how to eat on your own any more … all of a sudden, whether it’s a good or not-good marriage, it’s still two people together who have a child, a past, they have happy and bad moments … There are times when there seems to be so much emotion that you feel nothing.'

- GOSIA DOBROWOLSKA

'A single American stealth bomber costs five hundred million American dollars, and they are going to build one hundred and twenty of them. And then they turn around and complain about aid packages! Now that’s the kind of obscenity we accept in our lives, and yet none of us can stand being in the lavatory and hearing the splash next door.'

- BEN ELTON

'Over the period of time I’ve been in the public eye, I’ve had a lot of different experiences with the media, fans, that sort of thing, so I tend to … you know, the personal side of life has to be kept separate and so there is a guard which has to be put up … Something that I feel is mine and my wife’s and probably my family’s. I feel that my work should and has to be completely separate.'

- ANDREW ETTINGSHAUSEN

'I’ve fucked up, haven’t I?’ she says as she climbs onto the boardroom table. ‘I haven’t been very interesting … maybe I should be entertaining now and dance on the table … But I didn’t mean to be unhelpful - it’s just that you made me feel so vulnerable asking me all those questions.'

- LISBETH GORR (AKA ELLE MCFEAST)

'There’s this thing people say that the child won’t know its mother if it has a nanny and that’s rubbish! I know dogs and babies are different, and I had a Great Dane at home in Auckland, and I left her when she was quite young because I had to go back to England for months, and she knew who I was when I got back!'

- RACHEL HUNTER

'I was put in a cell by myself because I was considered to be a health risk. The guy I had been arrested with had syphilis, and the authorities wrongly assumed we were bum-chums, and they didn’t want a syphilitic to go bed-hopping at Parramatta … But I was still molested. I guess the best way to describe it is to say I was forced to have homosexual relations … they were ugly … but just blokes, you know?'

- SEAN KELLY

'It was only four months ago that my father actually did what he has always threatened to,’ she murmurs, slowly rocking on the sofa, hugging her thin knees to her chin. ‘He shot my mother. One bullet went through her breasts, missing her heart; the other went into her hip through her stomach … shrapnel all through her, you know?'

-MARIA KOZIC

'The thought of a man in power attempting to seduce her ignites a peculiar ferocity. ‘I would be appalled! I’d just tell him to go and get fucked! I don’t need any job where I have to cater to that kind of crap!'

- SOPHIE LEE

'However, men are men and women are women. That’s all there is to it. women who want to be men and men who want to be women are not, to me, particularly normal. I am a woman. I get my periods every month. I get premenstrual tension. I have babies, I like to wear skirts, I like to have men open the door for me and stand up for me when I enter a room. I have absolutely noooo ambition to wear overalls and to have somebody talk to me about some girl that he fucked last night.'

- ELLE MACPHERSON

Down on the dock walls, they have created a form of violence known as ‘knuckle-fighting’. A circle is drawn with chalk. Two men step into the circle and take each other on. no gloves or shoes or weapons are allowed. The two are only permitted to wear shorts. For eight to ten minutes straight, they fight for their lives.

- MALE PROSTITUTION

'Flash impressions: jet-lag, non-stop interviews. I was incredibly tired when I got [to Cannes] because I’d just danced for six weeks in France and South America, choreographed a ballet, flown for 26 hours, and then got off the plane and was taken straight to an interview. no shower, No shave, no nothing - straight to a press conference, and it just didn’t stop.'

- PAUL MERCURIO

'People tell me that they fall in love with me, but I sit at home, night after night, watching television documentaries, and I ask myself: Where are all these people who are falling in love with me? And, you know, I’m stroking the cat … I’m buttering a large piece of brown toast … I’m asking myself whether or not I really have anything at all to do with youth culture … it’s very curious.'

- MORRISSEY

'When I go through this extreme pushing of myself, this overwork, then I … I … I have … hallucinations. I am so afraid of that. It’s no joke. I used to push myself on and on and on until I collapsed, until I had to go to … hospital. I was hospitalized for hallucinations and for anx- for anxiety. Visions of horror, you know, which destroyed my life.'

- THIERRY MUGLER

Audrey interrupts the uncomfortable atmosphere with a plate of crustless curried-egg-and-chutney sandwiches. Neville looks at the plate with disgust, and springs from his chair - all shoulders and elbows as he thanks her and explains that he really must be going. ‘With your second wife, eh?’ his father asks.

- RICHARD NEVILLE

'The Italians have this eloquent visual vocabulary, beautiful. When I give companies proposals to manufacture my things, they come back to me completely overdesigned if the companies are Italian. They will have overcompensated in every way, but will have gone to the most infinitesimal degree in terms of details and qualities. The Australians, on the other hand,’ he wryly says, ‘will always try to cut corners.'

- MARC NEWSON

'You know, there is a vocabulary to cover what is not a democracy at all. A democracy is merely the shop-front. We live in a democracy, we have an election every now and again, but what really goes on in the shop is different ... In my opinion, you don't give in to corruption. I would suggest that there are other ways if the alternative is simply joining the corrupt.'

- JOHN PILGER

'... she'd been billed as the girl who looked as if she'd been put together by a sex-crazed Frankenstein ... I mean, she was staaaaacked! Like a living, breathing Vargas girl! I was quite overcome by the proximity of this utterly lovely woman who had it all together. George told her that I wanted to be a stripper, and she said: Right! FOLLOW ME! And she had these wonderful huuuuuge gorgeous lips - if she moved them a tiny bit, there were so many nuances going on - it was just … I was just falling into her mouth …'

- GRETEL PINNIGER (MADAM LASH)

'You know,' he eagerly says, 'it's like some of the greatest painters in the world who won't show certain canvasses because they don't think they're any good. The only ones people see are the good ones. And that's how my life is. I've had many disappointments in my life that I, in some cases, pass over. People see the achievement, but they don't see the failure prior to the achievement.'

- SIIMON REYNOLDS

The coffee arrives, and he pours me a cup before pouring himself a straight black and quickly downing it. he is still avoiding my eyes and periodically coughs, often inclining his head to energetically scratch his dark and greasy wedge of hair - the resulting sound something like wood being shaved; the resulting effect something like fingernails being scratched down a blackboard.

- NOAH TAYLOR

Wolf suddenly turns her big leonine head and fixes him with her forceful eyes. ‘Have you ever been in a courtroom during a rape case?’ she quietly says, a dangerous undertone to her words. ‘Because I have, and let me tell you, men do stick up for each other - they lie for each other - all over the world, every day.'

- NAOMI WOLF

(Holding the tape machine with one hand and driving with the other) ‘This is passion! This is life! Doing a hundred and twenty through Melbourne in a loaded Kombi! You know, I’ve got a full bladder and need to pee, but … where was I? Passion. Passion is something you have no control over, and you can’t recreate it, you can only exist between its bars … it can hold you like a cage. Passion is allowing yourself to be misguided, or misled, or to be guided, or led, or accepted, or understood ...'

- ADEN YOUNG