Peter Carey Quotes

34 quotes in 541 categories

• All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
• Swimming always cleans your soul
• 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…
• 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…
• Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.
• Living where I live New York I don't think anyone's going to make a fuss. But it is more deeply satisfying because it's of your…
• Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.
• 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…
• 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.…
• Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.
• 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,…
• I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.
• 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…
• I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
• I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.
• 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…

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