Quotes from Pat Barker

When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.

A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.

I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.

Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

My grandmother's first husband was a spiritualist medium. What fascinates me about that is the balance between conviction and sincerity and trickery, which is also something that novelists are very familiar with.

Being a writer is a poverty trap. I mean, it's a terrible profession.

'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.

When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.

I wasn't thinking of a sequel when I finished 'Life Class.' What changed my mind was the perception that the characters had a lot of life left in them, a lot of unresolved conflicts, and also I became interested in the Tonks pastel portraits of facially disfigured soldiers and in the whole area of facial reconstruction.

Someone once said to me: You never mention his looks. And it's true, I don't, I find it difficult. At that time, he was probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent, but that's the problem. How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of the attack? Achilles was like that- the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.

The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn't mind. It didn't occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.

Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks.

She was like a windflower trembling on its slender stem, so fragile you feel it can't possibly survive the blasts that shake it, though it survives them all.

Didn't you find it all … rather unsatisfying?" "Yes, but I couldn't seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways." A slight smile. "The result was I went nowhere.

Half the world's work's done by hopeless neurotics.

Fear, tenderness - these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.

He's a bar-room socialist, if that's what you mean. Beer and revolution go in, piss come out

All Achilles's emotions seemed to be varying shades of anger.

I thought: And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brother.

she lived a life almost obsessively devoted to triviality. She'd turned into a pond skater, not because she didn't know what lay beneath the surface, but precisely because she did.

It was... the Great White God de-throned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw that we weren't the measure of all things, but that there was no measure.