Peter Carey Quotes

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.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else

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

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

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

Swimming always cleans your soul

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.

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.

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.

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.

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

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