- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
Peter Carey Quotes
Most Famous Peter Carey Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
I always pity people who have to write my plot synopses.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Night
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Day
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Beautiful
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- Nov 07, 2020
My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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?'
- Fame
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- Nov 07, 2020
Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.
- Pain
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- Nov 07, 2020
Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.
- Change
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Always
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
- Class Consciousness
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Curiosity
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- City
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Mind
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Character
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- Nov 07, 2020
When I was young and easily outraged, I would be upset when every fictional character I created was somehow reduced to 'autobiography.'
- Culture
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- Nov 07, 2020
Culture is the way for a country to know itself.
- Commonwealth
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Ignorance
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life.
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020
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!
- Education
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- Nov 07, 2020
My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education.
- Daughter
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- Nov 07, 2020
My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher - well, that's a tautology - a country schoolteacher.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Father
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Being
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- Nov 07, 2020
At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.
- Expressed
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
When I finished 'True History of the Kelly Gang,' I realised that Faulkner had not lost his power over me.
- Continue
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all - even if it does continue to terrify me.
- Getting Older
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- Nov 07, 2020