Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter Carey
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: May 7
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Bacchus Marsh
Victoria
Australia
Peter Philip Carey
First
Edges
Going
Standing
Every
Especially
Like
Stand
Making
Cliff
True
Cliffs
Earth
Draft
Firsts
Edge

More quotes by Peter Carey

Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
Peter Carey
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.
Peter Carey
Image
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
Image
I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.
Peter Carey
Image
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
Image
(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
Image
You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.
Peter Carey
Image
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
Image
I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
Peter Carey