Top 74 Peter Carey Quotes
#1. I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
Peter Carey
#2. My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.
Peter Carey
#3. 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.
Peter Carey
#4. I knew I had been lonely, Mem, yet I had no understanding of my desolation until my skin was finally touched.
Peter Carey
#5. It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood.
Peter Carey
#6. What a torture to hear that a life had been available to me that I had not been man enough to live.
Peter Carey
#7. She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes.
Peter Carey
#8. Of course the town fed off all the sweat and labour of the miners and the poor selectors on the plains below but in those grand stone buildings they could bankrupt or hang you as they pleased.
Peter Carey
#9. 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.
Peter Carey
#10. She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant
Peter Carey
#11. I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.
Peter Carey
#12. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery, curved, dancing with light.
Peter Carey
#13. How do you know how much to pay if you don't know what it's worth?
Peter Carey
#14. She meant I was hungover. I had been slaughtered, legless, trolleyed, slashed, shredded, plastered, polluted, pissed. I thought, I do love my country's relationship with alcohol. How would I ever exist in the United States? I suppose I would have grief counselling instead. (77)
Peter Carey
#16. 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.
Peter Carey
#17. Oh, we were a degree or two hotter than improper.
Peter Carey
#18. I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.
Peter Carey
#19. 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.
Peter Carey
#20. A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life.
Peter Carey
#21. Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.
Peter Carey
#22. The clouds was light but queerly yellow on their edges as they moved across the ageless constellations.
Peter Carey
#23. 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.
Peter Carey
#24. Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.
Peter Carey
#25. 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?'
Peter Carey
#26. I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.
Peter Carey
#27. About her husband, i did actually enquire, but she held her private life so fucking tightly, like a tourist clutching a handbag on the A train,..
Peter Carey
#28. All Butcher's previous politeness was revealed as so much bad milk floating in a cup of welcome tea ...
Peter Carey
#29. She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together?
Peter Carey
#30. Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.
Peter Carey
#31. 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.
Peter Carey
#32. Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.
Peter Carey
#33. You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.
Peter Carey
#34. Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own.
Peter Carey
#35. To refrigerate a clock was an extremely violent act, not one I could explain to anyone.
Peter Carey
#36. ...it was born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice...
Peter Carey
#37. Many is the night I have sat by the roaring river the rain never ending them logs so green bubbling and spitting blazing in a rage no rain can staunch.
Peter Carey
#38. His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper desregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.
Peter Carey
#39. 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.
Peter Carey
#40. Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.
Peter Carey
#41. In the bush he taught the knots I use to tie my blanket to my saddle Ds also the way I stand to use a carpenter's plane and the trick of catching fish with a bush fly and a strip of greenhide these things are like the dark marks made in the rings of great trees locked forever in my daily self.
Peter Carey
#42. All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
Peter Carey
#43. 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.
Peter Carey
#44. 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.
Peter Carey
#45. 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.
Peter Carey
#46. 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.
Peter Carey
#47. To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.
Peter Carey
#48. 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.
Peter Carey
#50. We are alive on the very brink of eternity.
Peter Carey
#51. His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.
Peter Carey
#52. 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.
Peter Carey
#53. Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown.
Peter Carey
#54. I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
Peter Carey
#55. 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.
Peter Carey
#56. 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.
Peter Carey
#57. Owever she was a woman and I'd have more luck conjuring up the thoughts of a chinaman than I would figuring out what she was conspiring
Peter Carey
#58. 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.
Peter Carey
#59. I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.
Peter Carey
#60. She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of her soul.
Peter Carey
#61. People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else
Peter Carey
#63. For all the things that had happened to her, all the people she had met, the miles of ocean she had covered, she could feel nothing worth writing except: 'an exceedingly grand apartment which I spoil by the excess of irritation and agitation I carry with me everywhere...
Peter Carey
#64. She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.
Peter Carey
#65. Your American, you wouldn't know if you were up yourself.
Peter Carey
#66. Man is born free and is everywhere in chains
Peter Carey
#67. At the end of the day the fence were still not complete but my family had witnessed my new strength and they I could be the man
Peter Carey
#68. I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.
Peter Carey
#69. Everything we knew from life suggested that America would do what it liked ...
Peter Carey
#70. 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.
Peter Carey
#71. 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.
Peter Carey
#72. The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration.
Peter Carey
#73. 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.
Peter Carey
#74. My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.
Peter Carey
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