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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

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Helen Garner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: November 7
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Geelong
Victoria
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More quotes by Helen Garner

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I think writers are very anxious.
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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.
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That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.
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People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.
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The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.
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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
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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.
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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.
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But there are some wounds that can never be healed.
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I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.
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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.
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It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.
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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.
Helen Garner
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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
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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