Author Profile
Helen Garner
1942 • Australian • Novelist
34
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 34 quotesMaybe 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
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
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
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.— 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
While I was writing 'The Spare Room,' I thought, 'I'm going to look really bad in this book - there's no redeeming this kind of awful, ugly emotion', and I thought, 'I'm not going to change it. I'll call the character 'Helen' and admit to those feelings.' I think this is a reason why people write.— Helen Garner