Top 66 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Carey
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Australian novelist Peter Carey.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.
Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.
It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.
My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher - well, that's a tautology - a country schoolteacher.
The Australian cast of mind is not something I would want to be without - and I couldn't be without. It's not a choice.
When I was young and easily outraged, I would be upset when every fictional character I created was somehow reduced to 'autobiography.'
It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.
I'm someone who always wants to do everything differently. If I have a pattern, I'd rather I didn't have a pattern. I want every book to be unpredictable and new. Damn it!
I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.
My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education.
In about 1975-76, I lived with a woman in a little hut with some fruit trees, and I had some of the most extraordinary, happy times of my life. Apart from the horrendous Queensland police, who were corrupt and venal, it really was like living in paradise.
The failure of the U.S.'s foreign adventures often seems to have its roots in the U.S.'s total ignorance of things on the ground, of the countries that they fiddle with.
When I went to live in New York, I didn't mean to stay there, but here I am.
I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn't understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people.
I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.
I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing, I was always supporting myself. That's the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression.
The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.
My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.
Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.
I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life.
And it's always possible that you will not get a nice review. So - and that's enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can't talk back, and it's sort of shaming in a way.
One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.
I used to say when I was younger, 'I'm exhausted; writers can only write for four hours a day and that's done.' Now I find, as I'm getting older and I'm more aware of time, I can actually write all day.
I woke up in Australia almost every day for the first 47 years of my life. When I left, I didn't discard that, didn't reject that, didn't forget that. Not even New York City can wipe that out.
At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.
I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window.
What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?'
When I finally began to publish, my father never read my work. He'd say, 'Oh, that's your mother's sort of thing.' But my mother found the books rather upsetting. I figure she read just enough to know that she didn't want to go there.
Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way.
Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.
I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.
I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
I always pity people who have to write my plot synopses.
Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.
I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all - even if it does continue to terrify me.
I think there was, and there is, a real Commonwealth culture. It's different. America doesn't really feel to be a part of that.
Culture is the way for a country to know itself.
I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.
I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.
So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.
I was very anxious when I was writing 'Oscar And Lucinda.' I would take other books off the shelf to check my chapter length was OK.
I like how they are. I think they're great. And their communities are communities. I have a greater sense of community in New York than almost anywhere I've ever lived. Really, it's terrific.
Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' had an immense effect on me, and most of my novels bear the burn marks of this experience, those short chapters with their conflicting points of view, truth expressed by multiple perspectives. The other attractive thing about 'As I Lay Dying' was the way it gave rich voices to the poor.
When I finished 'True History of the Kelly Gang,' I realised that Faulkner had not lost his power over me.
There are people that you don't like because you're jealous of them until you meet them. And you haven't read their book because it's had so much attention. Then you meet them and discover they've been jealous of you, and you become friends.
People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else
Swimming always cleans your soul
To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.
Glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid?an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at thetop, and? It isinvisible, solid, in short a joyous and paradoxical thing, asgood a material as any tobuild a life from.
I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.
I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.
Living where I live New York I don't think anyone's going to make a fuss. But it is more deeply satisfying because it's of your place and means that you aren't forgotten; someone's noticed what you have been doing with your life.
If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.
Writers are always envious, mean-minded, filled with rage and envyat other's good fortune. There is nothing like the failure of a close friend to cheer us up.
It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.
Our prime minister could embrace and forgive the people who killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apologise to the Aboriginal people for 200 years of murder and abuse. The battle against the Turks, he said in Gallipoli, was our history, our tradition. The war against the Aboriginals, he had already said at home, had happened long ago. The battle had made us; the war that won the continent was best forgotten
I don't need new boots I got bluchers back down home. Eff the effing bluchers I'll buy you new adjectival effing elastic sided boots.
The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.
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