Helen Garner Quotes

Author Image

Helen Garner

Profession : Novelist

Birth : November 7, 1942

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

Helen Garner

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

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

Helen Garner

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

Helen Garner

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

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.

Helen Garner

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

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.

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.

Helen Garner

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.

Helen Garner

It's much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are inventible, remembered from some other time or stolen from other people's stories... and see if I can make it into something that works, an object, a little machine that runs.

Helen Garner

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.

Helen Garner

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