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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

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

More quotes by Peter Carey

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I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
Peter Carey
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Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.
Peter Carey
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You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.
Peter Carey
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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
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I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.
Peter Carey
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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
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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
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(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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
Peter Carey
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
Peter Carey
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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
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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