Peter Carey Quotes
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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.
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Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way.
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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.
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When I finished 'True History of the Kelly Gang,' I realised that Faulkner had not lost his power over me.
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Culture is the way for a country to know itself.
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At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.
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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.
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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.
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It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.
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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!
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When I finally began to publish, my father never read my work. He'd say, 'Oh, that's your mother's sort of thing.' But my mother found the books rather upsetting. I figure she read just enough to know that she didn't want to go there.
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I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
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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.
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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.
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It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.
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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.
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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?'
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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.
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My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education.
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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.
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My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.
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My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher - well, that's a tautology - a country schoolteacher.
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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.