Pat Barker Quotes
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'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.
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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.
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Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.
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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.
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Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.
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Being a writer is a poverty trap. I mean, it's a terrible profession.
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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.
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What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!