Peter Carey quotes - page 2

Peter Carey is an acclaimed Australian novelist best known for winning the Booker Prize twice. His works often explore themes of Australian identity, history, and culture. He has become one of Australia’s most celebrated and influential contemporary writers. Here are 50 of his quotes:

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.

Peter Carey

My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education.

Peter Carey

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

Peter Carey

When I went to live in New York, I didn't mean to stay there, but here I am.

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!

Peter Carey

Culture is the way for a country to know itself.

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.

Peter Carey

Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way.

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.

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.

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.

Peter Carey

I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life.

Peter Carey

My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher - well, that's a tautology - a country schoolteacher.

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.

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.

Peter Carey

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

Peter Carey

Swimming always cleans your soul.

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.

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.

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

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.

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.

Peter Carey

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Peter Carey

Occupation: Australian Novelist
Born: May 7, 1943
Quotes count: 50
Wikipedia: Peter Carey

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