Pat Barker Quotes

Pat Barker — English Writer born on May 08, 1943,

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. In 2012, The Observer named the Regeneration Trilogy as one of "The 10 best historical novels"... (wikipedia)

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.

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

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

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

'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.