Janette Turner Hospital Quotes

I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.

We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.

I've found you can go on writing in the dark, and that the act of writing itself, that mysterious, dangerous, intoxicating, absorbing, nourishing magician's trick, that act of creation is its own light.

Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.

There is always a gap between conception and execution. We keep writing in the burning hope of closing that gap before we die.

Her days come and go like birds, her dreams like days.

It often seems to me that the biggest single issue for a writer is how to stay buoyant enough to go on writing. How not to drown.

That is where homeland is. In that shifting space, kinfolk know one another by secret signs; and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.

There are all kinds of under-represented groups in the literary establishment.

The futility of action does not absolve one from the failure to act. -