Peter Carey Quotes
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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.
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Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.
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I always pity people who have to write my plot synopses.
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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.
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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.
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When I went to live in New York, I didn't mean to stay there, but here I am.
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I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.
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Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.
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When I was young and easily outraged, I would be upset when every fictional character I created was somehow reduced to 'autobiography.'
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I was very anxious when I was writing 'Oscar And Lucinda.' I would take other books off the shelf to check my chapter length was OK.
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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.
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I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all - even if it does continue to terrify me.
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I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life.
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I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
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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.
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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.