Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the autho…

- Pat Barker

A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.

- Pat Barker

You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

- Pat Barker

Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics.

- Pat Barker

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was …

- Pat Barker

It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.

- Pat Barker

I don't think it's possible to c-call yourself a C-Christian and... and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' -Wilfred Owen

- Pat Barker

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

- Pat Barker

Looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer.

- Pat Barker