Guess quote

Pat Barker [1943-0] English

Rank: 103
Writer

Patricia Mary W. "Pat" Barker CBE, FRSL is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres on themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. Her work is described as direct, blunt and plainspoken.

Relationship

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.		101
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.		102
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.	Relationship	103
Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.		104
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.		105
Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.		106
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!		107
'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.		108
Being a writer is a poverty trap. I mean, it's a terrible profession.		109
What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.		110
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.		111
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.		112

The script ran 0.006 seconds.