Quotes from Helen Garner

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

I tell you one thing that makes me feel I haven't wasted my life, and that is I've got some grandchildren. You can't overestimate the kind of opening to the future that gives a person, I think.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

Maybe this is pathetic, but I still dread producing a book that doesn't earn back its advance. I hate obligations that are financially foggy.

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.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

As in all matters involving love, which has so many different meanings, you find that the feeling that we label 'love' is not a simple feeling, it's a very complex one. Under the heading 'love' can come all sorts of rage and desperation.

I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.

Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.

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.

It's very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed up with their grief. In fact, often I think the anger that they feel is a form of grief; it's a kind of raging against what's happening.

That's the best thing that's ever happened to me, bar none, is having grandchildren and living by them and being part of their lives.

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.

I think writers are very anxious.

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

There's only one thing I know what to do, so I'm pretty much otherwise unemployable. The idea that you can make a living from exercising your only skill is wonderful. And it's wonderful to be read. It's a really exciting and happy thing to be read.

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.