A Quote by Pat Barker
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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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
Because of who my husband is, and our life, and also he is number one in the polls - well, you take that all together, and people are very curious about me. I'm choosing not to go political in public because that is my husband's job. I'm very political in private life, and between me and my husband, I know everything that is going on.
All the women that are first born daughters in my family are named Mary, but we've all been given nicknames. I don't know how or why that started, but I'm nicknamed after my great-grandmother, who was Mamie. No one ever calls me Mary, except only if my husband is very serious about something.
Significant consequences can begin very inconsequentially. That's one thing that fascinates me. The other thing that fascinates me is how accident can undermine something that's unfolding, something that might have played out differently otherwise.
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.
They sent me the script and I thought that there was something very appealing and funny about it. Also, I was familiar with Mike Myers work in Saturday Night Live, but I did not know the extent to which he would make this creation.
They sent me the script and I thought that there was something very appealing and funny about it. Also, I was familiar with Mike Myers' work in Saturday Night Live, but I did not know the extent to which he would make this creation.
My position is that the rate should align with the level of economic development. Because it is always about a balance, a balance of interests, and it should reflect this balance. A balance between those who sell something across the border and those who benefit from a low rate, as well as a balance between the interests of those who buy, who need the rate to be higher. A balance between national producers, for example, agricultural producers who are interested in it.
One of the biggest struggles that I've faced and overcome is finding a balance between emotion and facilitating it through logical means. One of the biggest challenges I have is finding that balance. This emotional mess that I am and this logical side of me, I try to find the medium that will balance me out. I think that's my big mission statement in life: to find that balance. It's a negative-positive and how that relates.
I see parallels between Karachi and the cities that I was familiar with: a very different place, but in terms of its human stories not really very different at all. That was what excited me about the place - that it was so complex, as difficult to me as an outsider and yet so human in a way that was ultimately very familiar.
Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.
I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic.
Dance fascinates me, and it is perhaps the most enriching audio-visual realm for a musician. Film-making also fascinates me.
The first fight I saw live, the fighter I was shadowing lost in front of a crowd of forty thousand people. The scale of that is staggering to me. Undergoing that overlap between something very personal and something very public strikes me as both admirable and also somewhat terrifying.
[After her 18-day disappearance in 1974:] I love my husband very, very much, but he didn't ask me when he ran for mayor and he didn't consult me about running for governor. It would be nice to be asked. ... You know, I've been my mother's daughter, my father's daughter, the wife of my husband, the mother of my six children, and grandmother to my eleven grandchildren, but I have never been me. But I am now because I went away. I am a changed woman.
If you're familiar enough with my body of work, my voice is a familiar totem, in a sense. I guess I have something characteristic in the way that I sing, although I'm not very personally self-conscious about it, so I don't think about it that much. But when I hear the record I can tell it's me.
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