Peter Carey Quotes
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I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.
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Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.
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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 nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.
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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 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 don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.
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Glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid?an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at thetop, and? It isinvisible, solid, in short a joyous and paradoxical thing, asgood a material as any tobuild a life from.
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Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.
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I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
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The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.
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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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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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It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.
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To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.
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I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.
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(From the story The Last Days of a Famous Mime) He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought this many, many times before. With perfect misunderstanding she interpreted his passivity as disdain. Wishing to hurt him, she slapped his face. Wishing to hurt her, he smiled brilliantly.
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Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.
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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 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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All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
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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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Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.
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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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Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.
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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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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 place and means that you aren't forgotten; someone's noticed what you have been doing with your life.
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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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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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You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.
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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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