Helen Garner quotes:

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.

As in all matters involving love, which has so many different meanings, you find that the feeling that we label 'love' is not a simple feeling, it's a very complex one. Under the heading 'love' can come all sorts of rage and desperation.

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.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

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

I don't understand my own sporadic collapses into passivity. Perhaps I never will.

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.

I think writers are very anxious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

I think that there must be a point of self-immersion in a story that is a point of no return. You get far enough in that the story has really touched you to the core and deeply troubled you and made you unhappy and fearful, and then how do you get out of that? I'm a writer, so my way of getting out of that is to write.

I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

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

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.

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.