Pat Barker
Pat Barker
Patricia Mary W. "Pat" Barker CBE, FRSL is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres on themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. Her work is described as direct, blunt and plainspoken. In 2012, The Observer named the Regeneration Trilogy as one of "The 10 best historical novels"...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth8 May 1943
thinking want faces
You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.
young allegiance deserve
A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.
results
The result was I went nowhere.
war world firsts
Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars,
moving sky air
The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn't mind. It didn't occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.
world duty
Looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer.
christian thinking awkward
I don't think it's possible to c-call yourself a C-Christian and... and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' -Wilfred Owen
world done half
Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics.
memories past accumulation
The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.
butterfly cutting soul
Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
hate character fiction
Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
pain empathy goes-on
It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.
shapes definitions persons
Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.