Peter Carey
Peter Carey

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.

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher - well, that's a tautology - a country schoolteacher.

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

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

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

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.

Peter Carey
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
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
Peter Carey

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

Peter Carey
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
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
Peter Carey

When I was young and easily outraged, I would be upset when every fictional character I created was somehow reduced to 'autobiography.'

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

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.

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all - even if it does continue to terrify me.

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

I'm someone who always wants to do everything differently. If I have a pattern, I'd rather I didn't have a pattern. I want every book to be unpredictable and new. Damn it!

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

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

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

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

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

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

Peter Carey
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
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
Peter Carey

In about 1975-76, I lived with a woman in a little hut with some fruit trees, and I had some of the most extraordinary, happy times of my life. Apart from the horrendous Queensland police, who were corrupt and venal, it really was like living in paradise.

Peter Carey
Peter Carey

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