Helen Garner
Helen Garner
Helen Garneris an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 November 1942
CountryAustralia
came challenge detachment ideas labour obsession people
Ideas came swarming through her, and like many people who labour in the obsession of solitude, she lacked the detachment to challenge them.
against anger dying form mixed people raging realise
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.
admit bad call change people reason redeeming spare ugly
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.
people noses
I like poking my nose into other people's lives.
justice people demand
People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.
book thinking people
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.
thinking people needs
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.
experience learned speak stone
I think one thing I've learned not to do from my experience with The First Stone was to pester somebody, to keep insisting that they speak to you.
exciting exercising otherwise wonderful
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.
Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.
bank drag fairly life painful stream work
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.
dread maybe producing
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.
future gives life wasted
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.
perhaps
I don't understand my own sporadic collapses into passivity. Perhaps I never will.