Helen Garner Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.”

“Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.”

“I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.”

“I don't understand my own sporadic collapses into passivity. Perhaps I never will.”

“Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.”

“But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.”

“Courts are supposed to be places of reason. But this, of course, is a fantasy. I mean, there is reason being used as a technique. But courts, in fact, are baths of emotions.”

“I just... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my mother was always shouting, 'Go outside!' But she shouted it at all of us. I think I was just kind of... rather an introverted child, probably.”

“I think that there must be a point of self-immersion in a story that is a point of no return. You get far enough in that the story has really touched you to the core and deeply troubled you and made you unhappy and fearful, and then how do you get out of that? I'm a writer, so my way of getting out of that is to write.”

“I used to feel an obligation to invent things. I felt I was a failure because I didn't do massive great novels about Australia or the outback or something. I just don't feel that any more.”