Peter Carey Quotes

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

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,..

Man is born free and is everywhere in chains

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

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

We are alive on the very brink of eternity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

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

Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own.

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.

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

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

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

chooks. You cannot go away and leave

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

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.

men in high collars who might - this

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Swimming always cleans your soul

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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