Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

— Helen Garner

I think writers are very anxious.

— Helen Garner

Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.

— Helen Garner

“judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.”

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

“It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.”

— Helen Garner

“It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.”

— 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

But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and…

— Helen Garner

I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want…

— 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…

— Helen Garner

There's only one thing I know what to do, so I'm pretty much otherwise unemployable. The idea that you can make a…

— Helen Garner

And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring…

— Helen Garner

I tell you one thing that makes me feel I haven't wasted my life, and that is I've got some grandchildren. You…

— Helen Garner

To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation…

— 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…

— Helen Garner

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars…

— Helen Garner

“How on earth could he not see it? It stood on the wooden floor behind him, in the corner just inside the…

— Helen Garner

“I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I…

— Helen Garner

“I remembered only the good and loveable things about him, not the wretchedness he caused me, and the dope, and the resentments…

— Helen Garner

“You'd die of shame at the thought of showing anyone what you'd written. Somebody somewhere says that 'the urge to preserve is…

— Helen Garner

“Do we identify with a criminal in that we too secretly long to be judged? Popularly, being ‘judgemental’ is ill thought of…

— 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…

— Helen Garner

Tentatively I stood a great lump of wood on the chopping block and bought the axe down on it. It flew into…

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

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

— Helen Garner

“I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.”

— Helen Garner

“The two big cities of Australia are tonally as distinct from each other as Boston is from L.A. or Lyon from Marseilles.”

— Helen Garner

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how…

— Helen Garner

I just... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my…

— Helen Garner

Maybe this is pathetic, but I still dread producing a book that doesn't earn back its advance. I hate obligations that are…

— Helen Garner

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,…

— Helen Garner

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's…

— Helen Garner

We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope...…

— Helen Garner

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that…

— Helen Garner