“You'd die of shame at the thought of showing anyone what you'd written. Somebody somewhere says that 'the urge to preserve is the basis of all art'. Unaware of this thought, you keep a diary. You keep it not only… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
Tentatively I stood a great lump of wood on the chopping block and bought the axe down on it. It flew into two perfect… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
“But I’ve been reading A Very Easy Death, about Simone de Beauvoir’s mother dying of cancer – it’s just brilliant. It really helped me.’… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
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… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
I just... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my mother was… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
“I realised I had a stream of thoughts about him which ran for the most part below conscious level. I noticed jets spurting up… — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
“It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.” — Helen Garner Copy Share Image
