Peter Carey
Peter Carey
Peter Philip Carey AOis an Australian novelist. Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times and is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Carey is one of only four writers to have won the Booker Prize twice—the others being J. G. Farrell, J. M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and won for the second time in 2001 with True History of the...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 May 1943
CountryAustralia
I thought that that was a really Australian story. And I wasn't mad at Dickens about that at all. I thought that seemed like us, in all sorts of ways.
It did not occur to me that I might be a writer until I flunked out of my first year as a chemistry major, and found work as an apprentice writer of Volkswagen ads.
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.
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.
To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.
I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
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.
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.
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.
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
Swimming always cleans your soul
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.
Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.
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.