Disher Quotes & Sayings

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel. — Garry Disher

A man rarely knows the day and hour when he will die. I could be killed any moment and there's not a blasted thing I can do about it. — Christopher Paolini

A curious thing happened: the terrains of England began to impinge on my consciousness, altering, then effacing, the world outside the library window ... I was wrapped in a pleasurable dreaminess. I was in a better place. If true life existed elsewhere, then I had almost found it. — Garry Disher

Jostling in the saddle against an iron shirt of mail wasn't half as romantic as the books made it out to be. — Amy Jarecki

From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment. — Garry Disher

A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader. — Garry Disher

To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers. — Garry Disher

At this point, Mrs. Disher stepped in to say, if you thought that was scary, look at how poor people lived in the late twentieth century. Indeed, after ractives told them about the life of an inner-city Washington, D.C., child during the 1990s, most students had to agree they'd take a workhouse in pre-Victorian England over that any day. — Neal Stephenson

I don't want to turn into one of those pathetic creatures who are always homesick, always saying I wish I were still in Beirut. I don't want to become like you, split between here and there. I know I'm not happy here, but why should I be unhappy in two countries? — Hanan Al-Shaykh

There is a word I have always avoided in my writing, my life, my thoughts. That word is love. What does it mean? How do you deal with it? If you find it and lose it, how do you get over it? Love is something you feel and when you feel it you can't trust it or define it. How can you sustain love for a long time? A short time? You may love your family, your friends. But you don't invite them inside your body. — Chloe Thurlow

The only good thing to come out of it was a kind of wisdom in Hirsch. He'd grown to understand that police officers can drift over time, and it isn't always or entirely conscious but a loss of perspective. Real and imagined grievances develop, a feeling that the job deserved greater and better public recognition. Rewards, for example, in the form of more money, more or better sex, a promotion, a junket to an interstate conference, greater respect in general. Some of these rewards were graspable, others the thwarted dreams that drove their grievances. Cynism set it. The bad guys always got away with it, and the media seized on the police officer who took a bribe rather than the one who helped orphans. So why not take shortcuts and bend the rules?? — Garry Disher

I grew up in a house full of books, and we belonged to the Country Lending Service - each month the State Library would send us a parcel of books by train. — Garry Disher

I wanted to be taken out of myself. — Garry Disher

At one level, an award is an endorsement, a confirmation, but I always find myself looking askance at awards and good reviews, as though another Garry Disher had earned them. — Garry Disher

The interior was dim like a cave. The ceiling, pressed tin, was stalactited with hooks from the days when the shopkeeper would hang it with buckets, watering cans, coils of rope and paired boots. Refrigerator cases lined a side wall, shallow crates of withered fruit and vegetables the back, and in the vast middle ground were aisles of rickety shelving, stacked with anything from tinned peaches to tampons. The sole cash register was adjacent to the entrance, next to ranks of daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines and a little bookcase thumbtacked with a sign, Library. If you were a farmer in need of an axe or some some sheep dip you headed for the far back corner. If you wanted to buy a stamp, you headed a couple of paces past the library. — Garry Disher

Chopper Read attended a writing school I gave for inmates at Risdon Prison in Hobart many years ago. Even if I hadn't known about his hacked-off ears and his criminal history, I'd have found him powerful and compelling. — Garry Disher

if I do not build Scripture into my mind and heart, the satanic world system's influences have uncontrolled access to my mind and heart. I then will be captivated by every sensation. I become a victim of my environment. Instead of the fruit of the Spirit, the product of the flesh results, — Earl D. Radmacher

The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life. — Stephen King

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen. — Paul Graham

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers. — Garry Disher

I didn't feel that there was much goodness in me. — Garry Disher

Ive got nothing against foreign managers, they are very nice people. Apart from Arsene Wenger — Tony Pulis