Garry Disher Quotes

#1. A curious thing happened: the terrains of England began to impinge on my consciousness, altering, then effacing, the world outside the library window ... I was wrapped in a pleasurable dreaminess. I was in a better place. If true life existed elsewhere, then I had almost found it.

Garry Disher

#2. I wanted to be taken out of myself.

Garry Disher

#3. From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.

Garry Disher

#4. I didn't feel that there was much goodness in me.

Garry Disher

#5. Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

Garry Disher

#6. A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

Garry Disher

#7. Chopper Read attended a writing school I gave for inmates at Risdon Prison in Hobart many years ago. Even if I hadn't known about his hacked-off ears and his criminal history, I'd have found him powerful and compelling.

Garry Disher

#8. I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

Garry Disher

#9. At one level, an award is an endorsement, a confirmation, but I always find myself looking askance at awards and good reviews, as though another Garry Disher had earned them.

Garry Disher

#10. I grew up in a house full of books, and we belonged to the Country Lending Service - each month the State Library would send us a parcel of books by train.

Garry Disher

#11. To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.

Garry Disher