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 CareyI have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
Peter CareyI 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 CareyIt'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 CareyOur 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
Peter Carey