Peter Carey Quotes & Sayings

I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

A mother can have no secrets in a settler's hut but she cannot so much as break wind and all her children must hear what she has done but now she were far away from Fifteen Mile Creek and no longer could I guess her life. I were told she took laundry and perhaps she did but I am sure she only did what she must do. She had a mother and father and brothers and sisters but in the end she were a poor widow and she had 7 children and all of them was alarmed and unsettled by their lives. — Peter Carey

Swimming always cleans your soul — Peter Carey

His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand. — Peter Carey

We are alive on the very brink of eternity. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

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

All Butcher's previous politeness was revealed as so much bad milk floating in a cup of welcome tea ... — Peter Carey

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

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent. — Peter Carey

Of course the town fed off all the sweat and labour of the miners and the poor selectors on the plains below but in those grand stone buildings they could bankrupt or hang you as they pleased. — Peter Carey

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

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from. — Peter Carey

Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown. — Peter Carey

The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

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

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. — Peter Carey

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell. — Peter Carey

About her husband, i did actually enquire, but she held her private life so fucking tightly, like a tourist clutching a handbag on the A train,.. — Peter Carey

Harry saw his death as if it was someone else's. He watched himself from outside his body and he wasn't
scared at all ... he found that he could slide between the spaces in the air itself.
Ecstasy touched him. He was stroked by something that felt like trees, cool, green and leafy. It occurred to him that he died, and he got scared. He felt walls like membranes which shivered with pain and a sound, a terrible sound which promised meaningless tortures, like the Christian stories of his youth. He
recognized the world of pleasure and the world of pain. Bliss, punishment,
heaven and hell. — Peter Carey

After we ate we was silent on our blankets looking out across the mighty Great Divide I never seen this country before it were like a fairy story landscape the clear and windy skies was filled with diamonds the jagged black outlines of the ranges were a panorama.
You're going to ride a horse across all that.
I know.
He laughed and he were right I knew nothing of what lay ahead.
See that there he pointed. That is called the Crosscut Saw and that one is Mount Speculation and yonder is Mount Buggery and that other is Mount Despair did you know that?
No Harry.
You will and you'll be sorry. — Peter Carey

At the Annexe, at this early hour, I delete you, my darling, my beloved, with your wide soft mouth against my neck. I would rather scrub your bones and place them in the open air, scrub your sternum, labour at your spine, scrub and scrub, with love, each vertebra, as particular as a nose, and lay you in the grass amongst the bluebells. There on your secret triangle of land I would be your most submissive tenant, would lie beside you until rain, wind storms raced, threaded like shoelaces through our missing eyes. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

How do you know how much to pay if you don't know what it's worth? — Peter Carey

She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes. — Peter Carey

She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together? — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

I don't need new boots I got bluchers back down home.
Eff the effing bluchers I'll buy you new adjectival effing elastic sided boots. — Peter Carey

Our father Blue Bones was much the same and we brothers cowered before his fury when TRACKED-IN SAND was detected on the carpets of the VAUXHALL CRESTA and then there were such threats of whippings with razor strops, electric flex, greenhide belts, God save us, he had that mouth, cruel as a cut across his skin. As a boy I could never understand why nice clean sand would cause such terror in my dad's bloodshot eyes, but I had never seen an hourglass and did not know that I would die. None shall be spared, and when my father's hour was come then the eternal sand-filled wind blew inside his guts and ripped him raw, God forgive him for his sins. He could never know peace in life or even death, never understood what it might be to become a grain of sand, falling whispering with the grace of multitudes, through the fingers of the Lord. — Peter Carey

You're discussing recreational drugs?" He stood and shut the door and came back looking very serious indeed. I was chastened, as I should have been. "Sorry. What have I never minded about?" "Well, I have truthfully always imagined it was my talent, my gift to introduce my friends to each other. Not one I could ever use for my own happiness, I must say. — Peter Carey

HIs great talent in life was to be a Good Bloke. He could walk into a room and sit down and everybody would be happy to have him, even if all he ever did was smile, for they imagined behind the mustache, behind the smile it hid, something sterner, more critical and yet, also, tolerant, so that when he smiled they felt themselves approved of and they vied with each other to like him best. — Peter Carey

A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life. — Peter Carey

It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery, curved, dancing with light. — Peter Carey

The hydrangeas are clipped for the winter and there is a gardener with rum on his breath (and odd socks on his feet) who offers to show you the scars on his back, the droppings of a wallaby, the scratchings of a bandicoot or a leech which he will pull inside out with the aid of a twig- T'only way to kill'un, missus. — Peter Carey

The most puzzling thing in the entire encounter occurred at a certain stage very late in the conversation, when she discovered she had been talking to a man. She had the feeling of a dream where things and people transmogrify, characters dissolve from one to the other like tricks in a film, monsters in a bottle. She had the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion's female gender; she had been pleased to find it, had relaxed into it, had been even more delighted to find it coupled with an elegant wit and a sense of both joy and irony. The forces of life, she thought to herself, are flying high tonight. — Peter Carey

(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. — Peter Carey

For all the things that had happened to her, all the people she had met, the miles of ocean she had covered, she could feel nothing worth writing except: 'an exceedingly grand apartment which I spoil by the excess of irritation and agitation I carry with me everywhere... — Peter Carey

She meant I was hungover. I had been slaughtered, legless, trolleyed, slashed, shredded, plastered, polluted, pissed. I thought, I do love my country's relationship with alcohol. How would I ever exist in the United States? I suppose I would have grief counselling instead. (77) — Peter Carey

The clouds was light but queerly yellow on their edges as they moved across the ageless constellations. — Peter Carey

She held out her hand, like a man. He hesitated, then took the hand and shook it. It was very warm. You could not help but be aware of the wild passage of blood on the other side of its wall, veins, capillaries, sweat glands, tiny factories in the throes of complicated manufacture. [He] looked at the eyes and, knowing how eyes worked, was astonished, not for the first time, at the infinite complexity of Creation, wondering how this thing, this instrument for seeing, could transmit so clearly its entreaty while at the same time - -Look, I am only an eye - -denying that it was doing anything of the sort. — Peter Carey

Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding. — Peter Carey

And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow. — Peter Carey

And in it's magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had half read of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel. — Peter Carey

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 — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

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

Owever she was a woman and I'd have more luck conjuring up the thoughts of a chinaman than I would figuring out what she was conspiring — Peter Carey

Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own. — Peter Carey

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

The camera observed me, but there was nothing in my bag except a pashmina, purse, and Lorazepam. I carried emptiness. Doors opened. Another camera recorded my progress. Doubtless there were thousands of my days repeated thus, interred digitally in limbo. I ascended two steps with nothing to look forward to, — Peter Carey

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

...it was born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice... — Peter Carey

Man is born free and is everywhere in chains — Peter Carey

In the bush he taught the knots I use to tie my blanket to my saddle Ds also the way I stand to use a carpenter's plane and the trick of catching fish with a bush fly and a strip of greenhide these things are like the dark marks made in the rings of great trees locked forever in my daily self. — Peter Carey

Everything we knew from life suggested that America would do what it liked ... — Peter Carey

Descartes said that animals were automata. I have always been certain that it was the threat of torture that stopped him saying the same held true for human beings. Neither I nor Matthew had time for souls. That we were intricate chemical machines never diminished our sense of wonder, our reverence for Vermeer and for Monet, our floating bodies in the salty water, our evanescent joy before the dying of the light. — Peter Carey

It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood. — Peter Carey

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

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

He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that had never been exercised before. It was a demonstration of 'nature.' He was a birth-wet foal rising to his feet. — Peter Carey

His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper desregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious. — Peter Carey

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

The seamen had whitewashed the smoky ceilings of the ward, and that dear homely smell carried the vividness of thatch and lumpy walls and stew given from the goodness of a stranger's heart. But that was all there was of comfort, and the salt air had turned from cold to warm in the passing of a life, an afternoon. — Peter Carey

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure. — Peter Carey

Fireworks made of glass. An explosion of dew. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence.
There are drugs that work the same, and while I am not suggesting that our founder purchased the glassworks to get more drops, it is clear that she had the seed planted, not once, but twice, and knew already the lovely contradictory nature of glass and she did not have to be told, on the day she saw the works at Darling Harbour, that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that 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 the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from. — Peter Carey

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

Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness. — Peter Carey

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

I knew I had been lonely, Mem, yet I had no understanding of my desolation until my skin was finally touched. — Peter Carey

To refrigerate a clock was an extremely violent act, not one I could explain to anyone. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

At the end of the day the fence were still not complete but my family had witnessed my new strength and they I could be the man — Peter Carey

But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love.
...
And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down.
'Come in,' she prayed. 'Oh dearest, do come in.'
But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracted to give away her fortune to. He offered to marry her as a favour and then he would not even come into her room.
Later, she could smell him make himself a sweet pancake for his lunch. She thought this a childish thing to eat, and selfish, too. If he were a gentleman he would now come to her room and save her from the prison her foolishness had made for her. He did not come. She heard him pacing in his room. — Peter Carey

Writers are always envious, mean-minded, filled with rage and envyat other's good fortune. There is nothing like the failure of a close friend to cheer us up. — Peter Carey

Your American, you wouldn't know if you were up yourself. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die. — Peter Carey

chooks. You cannot go away and leave — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

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?' — Peter Carey

She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant — Peter Carey

I saw Frau Helga counting money in the stable. I saw the fair down on her arms. Once I dreamed I might kiss her. Long ago. I was at the stream washing, naked, teetering on razor shale which can amputate your toes. When Sumper touched my shoulder I jumped in fright. My private parts shrivelled like gizzards in a stockpot. He was armoured in his leather apron, a beak in his hand, but I did not know that then. He said, "You will have been responsible for something far finer than you could ever conceive." "I wanted only a duck." "You were not born to have a duck. You were born to bring a Wonder to the world." And then he turned away and left me in my nakedness. — Peter Carey

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. — Peter Carey

Many is the night I have sat by the roaring river the rain never ending them logs so green bubbling and spitting blazing in a rage no rain can staunch. — Peter Carey

men in high collars who might - this — Peter Carey