Peter Carey Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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 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.”