Peter Carey Quotes

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Peter Carey

Profession : Novelist

Birth : May 7, 1943

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

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

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

Peter Carey

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

Peter Carey

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.

Peter Carey

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.

Peter Carey

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.

Peter Carey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Carey

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

Peter Carey

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

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

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

Peter Carey

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