Peter Carey Quotes
I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.
Quotes to Explore
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I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
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I don't have to really be in the 60s. Every time I hail a cab in New York, and they pass me by and pick up the white person, then I get a dose of it. Or when they don't want to take you to Harlem. I grew up with that.
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Because I'm in the public eye, I think that I would prefer to date someone regular who isn't in the news all the time, but I think even if you date someone regular, they'll still put it in the news.
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You turn up on set, and somebody who has come out of Oxford, has done a BBC course, is telling you how to act. You think, 'Do me a favour. Go and make a coffee.'
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Things are simple, it is us human beings that make it difficult.
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I love Bridget Fonda.
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The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.
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I don't want to talk about negative, dark things. The only thing I've got against stuff like Marilyn Manson is, they make unbelievable videos and unbelievable images.
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There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.
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People still text me to say that there is something about me in the paper, and what really annoys me is that if it's nasty, I then have to go and have a look, even though actually I don't want to know.
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I'm not the type of actor who is trying to do a whole bunch of different stuff, you know what I mean?
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I just know you can not be on top forever. There's always going to be the next guy, and if I'm going to go down, I'd like to know I helped the next guy take my spot. You can't prevent the inevitable, but you can join the ship.
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We see entrepreneurship and small businesses and supply chains as a critical part of the economic growth and competitiveness agenda.
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Those most moved to tears by every word of a preacher are generally weak and a rascal when the feelings evaporate.
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You can crush any woman by suggesting that she's fat, not even saying the word 'fat' but just suggesting she's fat.
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To me, 'The End of the Jews' - both the title and the novel itself - is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world.
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The teaching thing, the one where I have to impart my knowledge, is probably what comes the least naturally to me because I'm an absorber of things.
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What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and '60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies.
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Because the GIs were sent massively to South Vietnam, maybe it's a good idea to have a broadcast for them.
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I am still working on developing my voice. I am, I know, better as a coloratura singer than I was. It's a matter of strong breath control and yet making it sound as though it is the easiest thing in the world.
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The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
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I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.
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I think good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess. You don't actually consummate it, but you get to pretend, imagine what it would be like.
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I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.
