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
My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.
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.
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.
I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.
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.
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.
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.
Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.
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.
I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.
The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.
I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.
People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else
To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.