Top 44 Peter Carey Quotes

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It’s not really any very heady fame.

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.

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.

Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way.

When I went to live in New York, I didn’t mean to stay there, but here I am.

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.

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 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 would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else’s life.

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.

I’m interested in where we are, where we’re going, where we’ve come from.

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.

It’s not like I’ve got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I’ve got none.

I’m always the one with the activist friends. I’ve been an activist very little.

I have never begun a novel which wasn’t going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don’t know how to do it.

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.

My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education.

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.

When I was young and easily outraged, I would be upset when every fictional character I created was somehow reduced to ‘autobiography.’

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.

I don’t think you have the right to shout about other people’s private life.

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it’s pain. Pain concerning the past.

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world 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 have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all – even if it does continue to terrify me.

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?’

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 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.

Culture is the way for a country to know itself.

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.

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.

When I finished ‘True History of the Kelly Gang,’ I realised that Faulkner had not lost his power over me.

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.

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 think there was, and there is, a real Commonwealth culture. It’s different. America doesn’t really feel to be a part of that.

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.