Pat Barker Quotes

#1. Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics.

Pat Barker

#2. It's strange, isn't it? You go on and on, or I do rather, seeing God knows what horrors and learning not to care or anyway not to care more than you need to do the job, and then something happens that gets right under your skin.

Pat Barker

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

Pat Barker

#4. The way I see it, when you put the uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don't back out of a contract merely because you've changed your mind. You can still speak up for your principles, you can still argue against the ones you're being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job.

Pat Barker

#5. Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

Pat Barker

#6. The silence deepened, like a fall of snow, accumulating second by second, flake by flake, each flake by itself inconsiderable, until everything is transformed.

Pat Barker

#7. Didn't you find it all ... rather unsatisfying?"
"Yes, but I couldn't seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways."
A slight smile. "The result was I went nowhere.

Pat Barker

#8. Fathers remain opaque to their sons, he thought, largely because the sons find it so hard to believe that there's anything in the father worth seeing. Until he's dead, and it's too late. Mercifully, doctors are also opaque to their patients.

Pat Barker

#9. Murder is only killing in the wrong place.

Pat Barker

#10. 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.

Pat Barker

#11. It was ... the Great White God de-throned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw that we weren't the measure of all things, but that there was no measure.

Pat Barker

#12. I had him in my cab once.

Who? Neville asked

Rupert 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?

Pat Barker

#13. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.

Pat Barker

#14. The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

Pat Barker

#15. Half the world's work's done by hopeless neurotics.

Pat Barker

#16. 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.

Pat Barker

#17. From then on the improvement was dramatic, though still the conversations with the dead friend continued, until one morning he awoke crying, and realized he was crying, not only for his own loss but also for his friend's, for the unloved years.

Pat Barker

#18. You should go tho the past, looking not for messages or warnings, but simply to be humbled by the weight of human experience that has preceded the brief flicker of your own few days.

Pat Barker

#19. A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.

Pat Barker

#20. Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.

Pat Barker

#21. First-person narrators can't die, so as long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.

Pat Barker

#22. 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

Pat Barker

#23. Looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer.

Pat Barker

#24. 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.

Pat Barker

#25. One began by finding mental illness mystifying, and ended by being still more mystified by health.

Pat Barker

#26. Sad but true that nothing puts a woman in her place more effectively than a chivalrous gesture performed in a certain manner.

Pat Barker

#27. 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.

Pat Barker

#28. 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.

Pat Barker

#29. Being a writer is a poverty trap. I mean, it's a terrible profession.

Pat Barker

#30. 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.

Pat Barker

#31. In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who'd been there.

Pat Barker

#32. A flicker of fear, but it faded. The man looked round the room again, as if searching for something, but for something inside himself, Colin thought. For something he ought to feel, and couldn't.

Pat Barker

#33. The white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup.

Pat Barker

#34. 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!

Pat Barker

#35. You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

Pat Barker

#36. The result was I went nowhere.

Pat Barker

#37. Fear, tenderness - these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.

Pat Barker

#38. He's a bar-room socialist, if that's what you mean. Beer and revolution go in, piss come out

Pat Barker

#39. His happiness was almost painful, like circulation returning to a dead leg.

Pat Barker

#40. '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.

Pat Barker

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

Pat Barker

#42. On the face of it he seemed to be congratulating himself on dealing with patients more humanely than Yealland, but then why the mood of self-accusation? In the dream he stood in Yealland's place. The dream seemed to be saying, in dream language, don't flatter yourself. There is no distinction.

Pat Barker

#43. She lived a life almost obsessively devoted to triviality. She'd turned into a pond skater, not because she didn't know what lay beneath the surface, but precisely because she did.

Pat Barker

#44. In his experience, premonitions of disaster were almost invariably proved false, and the road to Calvary entered on with the very lightest of hearts. MR

Pat Barker