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
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
My mothers 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 womens rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old. – Geraldine Brooks
You cant write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. Im very interested in what religion does to us – its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence. – Geraldine Brooks
My first memory of the Rolling Stones is listening to Satisfaction at a sixth-grade slumber party at a friends house in Ankara, Turkey, where my family was living at the time. In the middle of our sleepover, my friends dad stopped the record when he heard the words girlie action! – Gayle King