Pat Barker Quotes

I need a distance to my characters when I write.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

I think every fiction writer, to a certain extent, is a schizophrenic and able to have two or three or five voices in his or her body. We seek, through our profession, to get those voices onto paper.

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

As I write, I try to be the character.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

There's a huge distance between who I am as a regular person and what takes place in my fiction.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I've written short stories from male perspectives before, and I've never had a problem with it as long as I've understood the character's emotions and motivations.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.