Peter Carey quotes - page 2

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. (Peter Carey)
It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none. View quote
Peter Carey
My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education. View quote
Peter Carey
I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before. View quote
Peter Carey
When I went to live in New York, I didn't mean to stay there, but here I am. View quote
Peter Carey
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! View quote
Peter Carey
Culture is the way for a country to know itself. View quote
Peter Carey
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. View quote
Peter Carey
Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way. View quote
Peter Carey
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. View quote
Peter Carey
When I was young and easily outraged, I would be upset when every fictional character I created was somehow reduced to 'autobiography.' (Peter Carey)
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. View quote
Peter Carey
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. View quote
Peter Carey
I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life. View quote
Peter Carey
My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher - well, that's a tautology - a country schoolteacher. View quote
Peter Carey
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. View quote
Peter Carey
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. View quote
Peter Carey
The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons. View quote
Peter Carey
Swimming always cleans your soul. View quote
Peter Carey
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. View quote
Peter Carey
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)
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. View quote
Peter Carey
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. View quote
Peter Carey
Then I fell in love and everything went to hell. View quote
Peter Carey
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. View quote
Peter Carey