Quotes by Helen Garner

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.

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?

It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.

Invisible magpies warbled in the plane trees. Softly, gently, never running out of melodic ideas, they perched among the leaves and spun out their endless tales.

I saw the bumpy shape of my skull, I saw myself shorn and revealed. I wandered in a dream around the city, glimpsing in shop windows a strange creature with my face.

And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.

On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels.

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

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.

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

But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at -- to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.

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.

I think writers are very anxious.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.