Top 50 Peter Carey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Swimming always cleans your soul.”

— Peter Carey

3. “I don’t think you have the right to shout about other people’s private life.”

— Peter Carey

4. “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

5. “Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.”

— Peter Carey

6. “The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.”

— Peter Carey

7. “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

8. “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

9. “Descartes said that animals were automata. I have always been certain that it was the threat of torture that stopped him saying the same held true for human beings. Neither I nor Matthew had time for souls. That we were intricate chemical machines never diminished our sense of wonder, our reverence for Vermeer and for Monet, our floating bodies in the salty water, our evanescent joy before the dying of the light.”

— Peter Carey

10. “Many is the night I have sat by the roaring river the rain never ending them logs so green bubbling and spitting blazing in a rage no rain can staunch.”

— Peter Carey

11. “She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.”

— Peter Carey

12. “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

13. “She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of her soul.”

— Peter Carey

14. “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

15. “We are alive on the very brink of eternity.”

— Peter Carey

16. “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.”

— Peter Carey

17. “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

18. “They had sat here, in this very room, their knees almost touching, and there had been a sense of almost breathless discovery, and while they had not become lovers everything was laid out, like a feast, and they were merely arranging the table decorations and putting out the place names, the final little touches, so that when the feast began it would have been a splendid thing, not only satisfying to the baser appetites but to the higher senses.”

— Peter Carey

19. “I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.”

— Peter Carey

20. “Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It’s not really any very heady fame.”

— Peter Carey

21. “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

22. “All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.”

— Peter Carey

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

23. “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.”

— Peter Carey

24. “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

25. “You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.”

— Peter Carey

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

26. “The seamen had whitewashed the smoky ceilings of the ward, and that dear homely smell carried the vividness of thatch and lumpy walls and stew given from the goodness of a stranger’s heart. But that was all there was of comfort, and the salt air had turned from cold to warm in the passing of a life, an afternoon.”

— Peter Carey

27. “So in the first draft, I’m inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what’s going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.”

— Peter Carey

28. “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

29. “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

30. “People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else.”

— Peter Carey

31. “For all the things that had happened to her, all the people she had met, the miles of ocean she had covered, she could feel nothing worth writing except: ’an exceedingly grand apartment which I spoil by the excess of irritation and agitation I carry with me everywhere...”

— Peter Carey

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

— Peter Carey

33. “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.”

— Peter Carey

34. “Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling – until now – had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.”

— Peter Carey

35. “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.”

— Peter Carey

36. “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

37. “It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery, curved, dancing with light.”

— Peter Carey

38. “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

39. “Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.”

— Peter Carey

40. “I have never begun a novel which wasn’t going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.”

— Peter Carey

41. “His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper desregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.”

— Peter Carey

42. “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

43. “To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.”

— Peter Carey

44. “Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it’s pain. Pain concerning the past.”

— Peter Carey

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

— Peter Carey

46. “Your American, you wouldn’t know if you were up yourself.”

— Peter Carey

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

— Peter Carey

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

— Peter Carey

49. “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

50. “Remember, this is the country of the duck-billed platypus. When you are cut off from the rest of the world, things are bound to develop in interesting ways.”

— Peter Carey