Pat Barker

“Everything stinks: creosote, bleach, disinfectant, soil, blood, gangrene.The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she's the voice of authority here, in the Salle d'Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.On either side of Paul as he cuts are two long rows of feet: yellow, strong, calloused, scarred where blisters have formed and burst repeatedly. Since August they've done a lot of marching, these feet, and all their marching has brought them to this one place.”

“It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.”

“Being a writer is a poverty trap. I mean, it's a terrible profession.”

“We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.”

“The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn't mind. It didn't occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.”

“I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!”

“I wasn't thinking of a sequel when I finished 'Life Class.' What changed my mind was the perception that the characters had a lot of life left in them, a lot of unresolved conflicts, and also I became interested in the Tonks pastel portraits of facially disfigured soldiers and in the whole area of facial reconstruction.”

“When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.”

“I had him in my cab once.Who? Neville askedRupert Brooke. He was good, him. "There's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England".That would be the bit with my nose under it; just fucking drive, will you?”

“I don't think it's possible to c-call yourself a C-Christian and... and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' -Wilfred Owen”

“What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.”

“I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.”

“When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.”

“Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.”

“My grandmother's first husband was a spiritualist medium. What fascinates me about that is the balance between conviction and sincerity and trickery, which is also something that novelists are very familiar with.”

“'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.”

“And the Great Adventure - the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys - consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had hardly known. No wonder they broke down.”

“Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.”

“That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.”