Quotes by Helen Garner

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.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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.

— Helen Garner

Life

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.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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.

— Helen Garner

Life

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.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.

— Helen Garner

Hope

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.

— Helen Garner

Life

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

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

I think writers are very anxious.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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

— Helen Garner

Life

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

— Helen Garner

Hope

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

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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.

— Helen Garner

Success

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.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom

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.

— Helen Garner

Love

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.

— Helen Garner

Wisdom