Helen Garner Quotes

• 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.

  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, I mean, because I’m established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.

  Helen Garner

•  

  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.

   

  Helen Garner

• 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.

  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

• 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

• 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.

  Helen Garner

• 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.

  Helen Garner

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

  Helen Garner

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

  Helen Garner

• I think writers are very anxious.

  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 the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I’m doing it completely intellectually.

  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

• 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.

  Helen Garner

• 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.

  Helen Garner

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

  Eustace Haydon

Helen Garner (18)

Birth:	7th November, 1942
Nationality:	Australian
Profession:	Novelist, Screenwriter, Teacher, Writer

About

Helen Garner was born in Geelong, Victoria, Australia. She is an Australian novelist, journalist, short-story writer and screenwriter. She has written several novels include: Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, and The Spare Room. Her Short story collections include: Short story collections, Postcards from Surfers, and My Hard Heart. She has written several films include: Monkey Grip, Two Friends, and The Last Days of Chez Nous. Her Non-fiction works include: The First Stone, The feel of steel, Joe Cinque's Consolation, This House of Grief, and Everywhere I Look. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with majors in English and French from the University of Melbourne. Between 1966 and 1972, she worked as a high-school teacher at various Victorian high schools.

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