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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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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At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.
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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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Culture is the way for a country to know itself.
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Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way.
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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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When I finished 'True History of the Kelly Gang,' I realised that Faulkner had not lost his power over me.
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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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I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
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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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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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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 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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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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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 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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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.
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My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher - well, that's a tautology - a country schoolteacher.