Quotes from Helen Garner

I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.

It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.

I've seen the way she comes on to him—I just can't stand it. You know—what really shits me is how you spend years working on yourself to get rid of all that stupid eyelash-fluttering and giggling, and then just when you think you're getting somewhere, you find out that guys still like women who do that sort of thing. I watch 'em fall for it, every time.

The two big cities of Australia are tonally as distinct from each other as Boston is from L.A. or Lyon from Marseilles.

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.

Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: 'So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.

You'd die of shame at the thought of showing anyone what you'd written. Somebody somewhere says that 'the urge to preserve is the basis of all art'. Unaware of this thought, you keep a diary. You keep it not only because it gratifies your urge to sling words around, everyday with impunity, but because without it, you will lose your life, ts detail will leak away into the sand and be gone forever.

But does psychological sophistication override a sense that some actions are just plain bad? How much of human behaviour, in the end, can one understand?

But I've been reading A Very Easy Death, about Simone de Beauvoir's mother dying of cancer – it's just brilliant. It really helped me.' She

From now until the end of the trial, every time [the jury] entered the court, Farquharson would spring to his feet in the dock and remain standing until they were seated—a protocol that seemed to say my fate is in your hands .

I had been working there for several months [in New York], in that climate of intellectual openness which is so astonishing to an Australian...

I wished to trust, and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.

Memo: do not drink coffee. It makes me uselessly nervy, even trembly, and engenders baseless optimism about my powers of creation.

The beginner will cling and cling to her thin first draft. She clings to the coast and will strike out into the ocean only under extreme duress

If he had been a monster, I wouldn't have been interested in writing about him. The sorts of crimes that interest me are not the ones committed by psychopaths. I'm interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life's unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.

It came to me that to turn the other cheek, as he had done, was not simply to apply an ancient Christian precept but also to engage in a highly sophisticated psychological maneuver. 216

sometimes, we touch each other. No one else gets that close to me. He behaves

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.

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

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.