Top Helen Garner Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Helen Garner Biography

Helen Garner (née Ford, born 7 November 1942) is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip, was published in 1977, and immediately established her as an original voice on the Australian literary scene. She is known for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her widespread attention, particularly with her novels, Monkey Grip and The Spare Room (2008).

Read about Helen Garner in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Helen Garner Quotes

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.

Contested, Husband, Looks, See, Thinking, Working

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

Against, Disturbed, Violence, Violence Against Women, Women

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

Summer, Morning, Tunnels, Trams, Rolling, Chattering

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.

Able, Behaviour, Everything, Government, Moment, Purely

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.

Book, Thinking, People, Insist, Think

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.

Fiction, Know, Mean, Take, Way

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

Art, Degree, Job, Jobs, Mediocre, Teaching

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

Book, Can Do, Dignity, Restore

I think writers are very anxious.

Anxious, Think, Thinking, Writers

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

Able, Art, Life, Privilege, Somebody

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

Art, Healed, Wounds

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

Bars, Dream, Self, Writing

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.

Huffy, Melbourne, Spring, Tight, Tram, Trams

Tentatively I stood a great lump of wood on the chopping block and bought the axe down on it. It flew into two perfect halves. Such was my elation that I ran inside, put on our ancient cracked record of Aretha Franklin singing Respect and danced all by myself for half an hour in our living room, without inhibition, almost crying with jubilation – not just about the wood, but because I could live competently some of the time, and because that day I liked myself.

Block, Liked, Perfect, Respect, Time, Two

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.

Baths, Domed, Morning, Reading, Summer, Water

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

Like, Lives, Nose, Noses, People, Poking