Damian Barr Quotes

You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that.

Reading is an act of radical empathy: turning the page instead of turning away.

I had to do things to myself on the page that had been done to me in real life. I had to try and drown myself in the bath. You have to do that. And the impulse is to rescue yourself and to spare the reader, but I can't rescue myself. And why should I spare the reader when nobody spared me? It's telling people what happened.

Because I work at other things, whenever I get a chance to write I feel grateful for it. But I learned that sometimes, I couldn't do anything else and I shouldn't plan to do anything that night or the next day. There were times when I was writing something difficult for days or weeks and when I'd finish, I would get up and go out of my shed into the garden and be sick. I had terrible migraines.

I could never do just one thing, but everything I do is in the direction of stories. Sometimes writing them, sometimes showcasing them, sometimes letting people see them.

Quotes › Authors › D › Damian Barr › The stories we tell ourselves about...

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s.

I went through in the edits and cut tons of stuff that was "funny" because if it wasn't funny at the time, so it shouldn't be funny now. It's about having that unity of experience. You have to try and take away your hindsight knowledge of a situation.

Maggie, tou made it possible -but not probably for me to be the man I am now.

Memory implies that there is some static time and place you can go back to, whereas if you relive it by trying to put yourself back in that context, its more nuanced, less black and white. More traumatic, but also more exciting. When I knew I had to write about things that would be painful, I put off doing it for ages. But then eventually the fear of not doing it becomes greater than the fear of doing it.

We are not all in the same boat. We are in the same storm. Some of us are on superyachts. Some of us have just the one oar.

I am a gay writer, but I am also a Scottish writer and some days a lazy writer, or a funny writer. Being gay is just a part of who I am.

There's no place like home. No place safer. No place scarier.

The second time I try to kill a man I'm fourteen. Killing a man seems a very grown-up thing to do - like writing in Biro.

Equal marriage makes a huge impact, because people see gay people being allowed to be happy," he says. "And these events involve families – and not just families but caterers and florists and hotels. And all these people are forced to accept that here are two people who are in love and want to build a family together . . . But I'm not complacent. Progress can falter, and rights can be taken away, and people can be repressed again very easily.

I cut a lot of cringy sex stuff and a lot of stuff I thought was too personal. I think secret gardens are very special. I think we all have to have them. I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.

I started writing when I was a journalist. But every time I sat down to write a novel or a story, I ended up writing about myself, which was incredibly annoying and self-involved.