Quotes from Peter Carey

At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.

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.

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.

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.

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 possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

I always pity people who have to write my plot synopses.

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.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

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.

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?'

It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.

I like how they are. I think they're great. And their communities are communities. I have a greater sense of community in New York than almost anywhere I've ever lived. Really, it's terrific.

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.

My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education.

I used to say when I was younger, 'I'm exhausted; writers can only write for four hours a day and that's done.' Now I find, as I'm getting older and I'm more aware of time, I can actually write all day.

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.

I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

When I finished 'True History of the Kelly Gang,' I realised that Faulkner had not lost his power over me.

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.

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.

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.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else