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" The structure of 'March' was laid down for me before the first line was written, because my character has to exist within Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women' plotline. "
Geraldine Brooks
Women
Character
Down
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" I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life. "
Geraldine Brooks
My Life
Process
Sea
" Sydney in the 1960s wasn't the exuberant multicultural metropolis it is today. Out in the city's western reaches, days passed in a sun-struck stupor. In the evenings, families gathered on their verandas waiting for the 'southerly buster' - the thunderstorm that would break the heat and leave the air cool enough to allow sleep. "
Geraldine Brooks
Heat
Cool
City
" When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story. "
Geraldine Brooks
Nature
Writing
Human Nature
" I was so shy. I used to cross the street so I wouldn't even have to talk to my relatives, much less strangers. That's not shy, that's wise. But I found that that when you had a journalist's notebook in your hand it wasn't really you, you see. "
Geraldine Brooks
You
Talk
Wise
" For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite. "
Geraldine Brooks
Yes
People
Me
" And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same. "
Geraldine Brooks
Say
Lost
Know
" I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in. "
Geraldine Brooks
Down
Flight
Place
" The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure. "
Geraldine Brooks
Build
Find
Imagination
" My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old. "
Geraldine Brooks
Women
Faith
Family
" I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plunge through the front door at about 3 P.M. "
Geraldine Brooks
School
Son
Myself
" When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his cap, or head, and Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear. "
Geraldine Brooks
Head
Man
Working
" I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers. "
Geraldine Brooks
Book
Story
Me
" You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence. "
Geraldine Brooks
Violence
Empathy
Religion
" While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding. "
Geraldine Brooks
Me
Think
Time
" I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk. "
Geraldine Brooks
Writing
Time
Story
" Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine. "
Geraldine Brooks
New
Wine
Bread
" Yes, it seems we've got this mutant gene in our human personality that makes us susceptible to this same kind of mistake over and over again. It's really uncanny how we build these beautiful multicultural edifices and then allow this switch to be flipped and everybody goes, 'Oh, the other, get them out of here.' "
Geraldine Brooks
Personality
Mistake
Beautiful
" Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self? "
Geraldine Brooks
Self
Think
People
" I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war. "
Geraldine Brooks
Soldier
War
Without
" One thing I believe completely is that the human heart remains the human heart, no matter how our material circumstances change as we move together through time. "
Geraldine Brooks
Time
Believe
Change
" September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage. "
Geraldine Brooks
Who
People
Heroism
" I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with. "
Geraldine Brooks
Words
I Can
Sometimes
" We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures. "
Geraldine Brooks
Animal
Elephants
Only
" Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade. "
Geraldine Brooks
Push
Stop
True
" Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733. "
Geraldine Brooks
History
Live
Small
" If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion. "
Geraldine Brooks
She
Past
Me
" I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader. "
Geraldine Brooks
Going
Newspaper
Printing
" I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days. "
Geraldine Brooks
Reading
Way
Become
" I was a pretty delicate kid. Anything that was going around I'd get it and I'd generally get it much worse than other people, so I spent a lot of time out of school. "
Geraldine Brooks
Kid
Going
Time
" Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house. "
Geraldine Brooks
House
Deal
Words