Quotes from Peter Carey

She sat so straight, such a good back, such a proper back, a back you would trust in any crowd, and there was her hand—a different animal entirely—scuttling off down, a tiny crab with its friend the snake, gone stealing little florets of cauliflowers. Sol Myer started giggling. You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.

He held back nothing of himself in his effort to please his audience

It was a costume fit for an age which had begun by proudly proclaiming its lack of regimentation and ended railing at its own disarray.

The brain is a funny thing, the way it works, always looking for the most polite explanation...

I would be the worst person on earth to be called to write an account of someone else's life.

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.

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.

Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

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.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

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.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

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

She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of her soul.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

Swimming always cleans your soul

Oh, we were a degree or two hotter than improper.

I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.

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.

What a torture to hear that a life had been available to me that I had not been man enough to live.

Our prime minister could embrace and forgive the people who killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apologise to the Aboriginal people for 200 years of murder and abuse. The battle against the Turks, he said in Gallipoli, was our history, our tradition. The war against the Aboriginals, he had already said at home, had happened long ago. The battle had made us; the war that won the continent was best forgotten