19 Quotes by Damian Barr

There's no place like home. No place safer. No place scarier.

We are not all in the same boat. We are in the same storm. Some of us are on superyachts. Some of us have just the one oar.

Mary the Canary lives in a cloud of perfume and colours. She's an auxiliary nurse by day and a country and western singer by night: bed pans and power ballass. She's so glamorous she makes Mrs Hart look plain. She is the other woman and I'm bring trained to hate her even though I've never met her.

Quotes › Authors › D › Damian Barr › The stories we tell ourselves about... The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s.

You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that.

Researching and writing my novel has taken me to some really dark places. It is when you are in these dark places that you can see: there is always hope, there is always love.

Cape Town, so beautiful she was bored hearing about it and would never go just to spite it.

I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.

Reading is an act of radical empathy: turning the page instead of turning away.