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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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