YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Carey

lines on the record: 40
first: 2008-06-20
most recent: 2008-06-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know. I've always been rather taken as an Australian children's story called Magic Pudding, and it was written during the Depression as a character called The Magic Pudding, and it's Steak and Kidney. And if you turn around twice it becomes plum duff and it never runs out.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“just changed my mind. WG Sebal Because it is so extraordinarily beautiful, complicated that one reads and reads I've read it three times, and I'm still finding fundamental structural things about it, I'm understanding it better every time I read it, and there's still more to understand. I think it's a, you know, you can read it fifty times, I'm sure, and not and be finding more things.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and brings layers and layers of an orchestra to a company this man, and it is so moving that the person has sort of lost and solitary should be joined and celebrated by this art. And so it's like he builds a sort of a cathedral around this man and it goes right back to what I wanted to do at the very, very beginning of my writing life when I read Faulkner and it is the thing of giving voice to the voiceless. It's making art from the dispossessed and the person who you think has no art and nothing much to celebrate. It's a monumental work and very, very moving.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was just thinking about the Tom Frampton song and how certain songs are gifts. Charlie really gave this gift to Francis and I, and we share it continually. He often plays it to us and we all laugh. And that's a very serious substantial gift. Francis also gave me a gift when we first met, she played me a track of Gavin Briars, English composer Jesus Blood never failed me yet. I mean, it's a lonely, I guess lonely, solitary man, homeless, and he's singing this song. And Gavin Bryce gets this song.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know whether rage is a very useful tool on a desert island, frankly, pretty, very, very destructive. It can be quite useful to energize you through modern urban environment, but not at all useful on a desert island. The religion is useless to me because I've pretty much given Given all of that up, and Well, I guess I would just have to be doing a lot of laughing, I guess.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I would have to yes. I mean, I think that's, you know, it isn't something that I would choose, it would be a sort of, but I think it is my nature for find a way through and to survive. So yes, I think I would”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, what is the logic of the situation? What do you have to do? I mean, I'm one of the things I'm just working on right now. I had to think about these characters on Dartmoor in seventeen ninety eight with nothing. How they were going to survive and eat and how very, very difficult that was going to be.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'd probably get mad in a minute. I have no one to talk to. I don't know. I think solitude would be I am not suited to solitude. Really?”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“not only laugh because of the song, but I'm touched also by the relationship with the father. And it's called Of Cowboys, Pirates, and Lawyers.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both my sons enrich my life in all sorts of ways, and this is one from the youngest one, Charlie. And he's a very serious young man, and he certainly we think children are not political, but he's very, very political and very, very concerned about the future, and I think he would declare himself to be an anarchist of a particular sort. So he listens to a lot of music that's very political. We have punk music that's very political. And I'm not here to pass any critical judgments at all on this, but Charlie played this for me, and it just makes me smile and laugh and be happy in a way. And I think one of the underlying things of it is probably that you're listening to this guy singing in this very particular way, and he does have a relationship with his father, you see. And I think it's the relationship with the father that”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does that suit you? Oh, it suits me a lot. And the notion that so many of the people that one meets and talks to have a neither home in their heart too. And we share that. And to talk about it and discuss it with all sorts of people about where they come from, what they feel about it when they go back. All of those things joins us, the fact that we've got a second home and our heart is in another place as well. That's who we are.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's permanent for us, and I think we'd both think as far as we can see, we're there, but we're also old enough and have done enough things to know that we could end up somewhere else. We don't know where that is. We're very, very happy living there.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When she died I inherited a million bucks. I can't help it if I'm lucky This mad raging song was a source of great comfort to me”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, well, I've listened to Idiot Wind by Bob Dylan forever. I went through at certain times what became incredibly public divorce, which was very painful. Divorces are just hell for everybody, and then for them to become public and people sticking their noses in your business is unendurable. And so at that particular time, and you know, and there's a lot of rage and unhappiness. At that particular time I got enormous comfort out of Dylan's idiot wind because I suddenly understood what he was writing about. It begins someone's got it in for me. They're planting stories in the press. I wish they'd cut it out, but whether or not they were like an only guess. They say I shot a man called Grey and took his wife to Italy.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do. But we talk about this sometimes. We don't hear each other's accents. And I think that's when you're very close to somebody. You really don't notice. I'm also in love with and living with and have been for five years a wonderful English woman called Francis Cody and she runs a publishing house in New York City. So I'm not going to run away from her having, I mean, I didn't know I met her first in'85, you know, so long ago and then when my marriage ended and I was rather depressed and sorry for myself, we met again, and it was just I've been happy ever since.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my former wife. passionately wanted to go to New York So I was happy to go, and it was a new place. I mean, New York is an extraordinary place, and I love, I mean, I didn't start off loving the city. I was rather frightened of the city in a rather pathetic way, although, you know, it was a little while ago, so it was a little tougher. And also, you know, the entanglements of life as such that I now have, you know, seventeen year old and a twenty one year old, for which New York is their home. And”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I mean the thing of a child being born is the most miraculous thing. One of the great miracles of my life No, and I love my two boys incredibly and and all of this time later, you know, I'm incredibly close to them. I responded. being a parent very well, I think.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I admire David Byrne as an artist so much, and I think his work is continually original, he's a person of incredible personal integrity. He still gets around New York on his bicycle and he goes and listens to music where the equivalent sort of people, they're not going out the clubs to listen to new music and know what's going on. But David is always there in the back. No one really recognizes him or if they do, they don't say anything. He's a good guy, and life during wartime I love very much.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It didn't really, really occur to me at all. No, I don't think so. And also, you've got to also remember that the whole, if one is going to write and write that length of time, one is continually grandiose too, you know, so the sense of having written something wonderful was not new to me. That's what I felt about all those terrible no”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they just started happening. And I got reviewed and praised enormously and not all that much longer. I mean, I was then living up in Queensland and I wrote some more short stories, all of them, the sort of best of, was published by Faber here in Random House in the US. And I got, I couldn't believe it. The Times wanted to interview me and have lunch at Langham's. Oh my God was unthinkable.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, returning from London to Stregastad to write short stories, and all my novels had sort of been failures in one sense or another, huge structures that had things wrong with them that I realized at the end I'd invested all this time in something that couldn't work And so in a way, not being prepared to risk so much, I just thought, well, I don't have to be building palaces, I can build these little sheds, these little huts, and if they fall over, well, I don't care, and I'll take a lot of risks, and I'd learn from writing these appalling novels. And the short story started to work, and I wrote one one week, and then I wrote another one the next week, and I wrote another one the week after that.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, Listen, Peter, this is Queensland. We don't need a warrant to search this place, and we'll find something. Don't worry. Now, what's your date of birth? And that's what it was like.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later, later always do things at the wrong time and was really wonderful. It's the only place I ever lived on earth where no one said what do you do? And as very beautiful and a beautiful river, a fantastic forest, and we'd work in the morning and ride every morning, and the afternoon you go to the beach and lovely, gorgeous empty beaches. And apart from the fact that it really was without being hysterical, a corrupt police state, which Queensland was, and the police paid continual attention to the hippies. In fact, my first experience there was removing some White ant affected material from the back of the hut, and he suddenly finding these two cops standing beside me and they say what's your name? And I said it's Peter Carey. All right, Peter, what's your day of birth? And I got all sort of high voiced and anxious and said”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, all during that period that I was living in Nottinghill. I used to begin each day's work, listening to Bob Dylan. As I get older and listen to him more and more, and I go through periods of huge doubt about him, I must say, one realises his enormous skill, not just as a performer, which I think he has made himself with this glorious old man that he always wanted to be, but the way in which the lyrics fight with each other, contradict each other. I just I think he's truly great artist. It's called Thunder on the Mount”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“felt really good to come to this country. Immigration guy looked at me and said, You look more English than the English. I felt really pleased. Everything about coming here really did feel like sort of coming home. I had long hair, which made me at that time in Australia possible victim of a beating at any moment. And suddenly it felt really safe to be here and to live in Nottinghill, and I felt really deeply, deeply at home.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they had to do it. They were older, they were better educated than I was. So yes, they had no choice. They had to do that. By the time it was my turn, I didn't have to do that. I did come to this country, but it wasn't really to flee anywhere. It was just an Australian thing to want to experience the rest of the world, which was so unimaginable that when I got to Greece and saw they had tomatoes and cucumbers, I was astonished. I was surprised they had the same vegetables.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it is amazing how far you can move from yourself and how you can imagine what it is to be other because after all, I think that's the job description. That's the game.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, I'm very bored by the notion of I mean, I don't know quite what this means, but I think there's a huge difference between art and self expression. I'm not really very interested in writing about myself or exploring myself. I'm interested in making something new, and I hope beautiful it never existed in the world before, and I'm interested in moving so far beyond what I know. And that's why it's thrilling to me, you know, that you get to write a book and it'd say it takes you three years and you have a book like Oscar and Lucinda and you start with an idea which, in the case of Oscar and Lucinda, is a box full of Christian stories floating through a landscape filled with Aboriginal stories, like some sort of cartoon or diagram. And you end up three years later with these people. And what a miracle. I mean, for the writer, I mean, what a pleasure to have that journey.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was even worse than that, really, because there I am what seventeen or eighteen. Everybody I know is at university, and we all go to the same parties. I would never go to a party of someone from advertising. And people say, what are you doing? I say I'm working in an advertising agency, and they start to curl their lips, you see. And so part of this, I think, was sort of an act of redemption. Then, of course, they'd sneer at that. Of course, someone in advertising going to write a novel. And so I made a lot of friends in the sort of violent arguments that then followed with these people who dared to sneer at me when I said I was going to be a writer.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is, I am stuck in my childhood, aren't I? This is a Bacchus Marshalong. It's the other side really of the Elvis Presley story, where to be in Bacchus Marsh it would be impossible to imagine Handel's Messiah. The sheer sense of, you know, Geelong Grammar had what I thought was a hugely grand chapel. In fact, it was rather austere, but it did have glorious rude screen and a fantastic organ, and it was very, very high and narrow, and every year, as I recall, they'd do something like the Messiah. To listen to the Hallelujah chorus now is like at some enormous musical monolisa cliche and yet if one tries really hard to get beyond that I certainly still feel that just a sheer sort of soaring glory of it and so we just have to think this is not a television commercial.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was driving a car that my parents had given me which they themselves had on, and I was just a young idiot there was stuff that was wrong with the steering and it got stiff and then one day part of the front suspension just fell out lost all control of the car hit a huge lamppost and brought it to the ground and sculpted myself and I remember waking up and all I could think was thank God I got an excuse to fail my exams and I really literally thought it at that moment and what a stroke of good luck I thought of course then the bastards gave me supplementary examinations and I failed all those so I didn't really escape”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was just a different sort of science, I guess, and it was way more mathematical and way more abstract, and I was in I don't know what I was going to do. And I didn't really solve the question of what to do about chemistry because I never ever did get to really understand it. But I changed my major, I declared that I was going to become a zoologist because it was all the same subject. But the zoologists read books and new painters and were generally much more sort of Bohemian. And they went to the pub and got drunk and we I liked them.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“really cool and I try and buy the same thing in Bacchus Marsh and come back to school and realise it was just totally wrong and it was like this with the Elvis Presley I went into there was a store in Bacchus Marsh which was part hardware store part electrician and it was called RB Supply Company Robber Bob we called him and they had a record thing so and I'm looking there and I found these 78s which we were still playing then of Elvis Presley and I took them home and I played them and they were all wrong they were not the right Elvis ones and one of course these things that I'd bought were the very first recordings that Elvis Presley made when he went into sun records in Memphis, Tennessee. And years later I listened to the sun sessions and I recognized all of these tracks that had so upset me and embarrassed me because they were not real. And so this particular the next track that's all right.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a Elvis Presley. I think this is about the period when I'm first at Geelong Grammar, you ain't nothing but a hound dog was out. But I had the problem always of do my shopping and back a smash at the vacation. Now all the other kids, they're going off to sort of”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, really, really posh. I mean, the town itself was predominantly working class or lower middle class, some of the less privileged people. I went to school with would be held back every year until they turned fourteen when they could leave school. And one of the boys would sort of stand up and the teacher would say, Where are you going? And he'd say, fourteen you can't bloody touch me and he woke out and then they get all their teeth pulled out for a quid and go and work and it was a coal mine and there was a milk factory and things so then to go from that to Geelong grammar where everybody addressed each other by their surnames, and many of the people, teachers, particularly taught that they could have been in the home counties, you know.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh well, it's a little town with the cutesy name at this distance of Bacchus M thirty three miles due west of Melbourne in the middle of farming country which was wheat and sheep for the most part and my father sold cars to farmers by standing in paddocks risking pneumonia which he was always prone to and we had a little business in the middle of this town and my mother worked downstairs in the spare parts department and men would arrive and not wanting to see the manager this is nineteen forty fifty early fifties and she would say I am the manager you know and daily daily my mother fought this battle with men who would not really acknowledge that she was in charge and my father always certainly gave her the credit for being the intelligent one which was really not quite correct but that was the thing that was I had a book or something or I wrote something and say your mother would understand that I wouldn't understand that and you went?”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Myles Davis with John Coltrane and Round Midnight It's the first piece of jazz I ever ever heard, and it's a little bit like reading Faulkner for the first time in that I didn't know this existed and I must have been about seventeen I was at Geelong Grammar School in Australia and I was playing hooky with a friend whose father was a teacher there We sat on the verandah, and we smoked pipes, and I didn't know it had been recorded in New York City, but I imagined a city like New York, and all the future and all of its possibilities and magic sort of waiting was a very memorable night.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember that when there was a possibility of winning at the first time for Oscar and Lucinda I was just sick with anxiety, and when Oscar and Lucinda won I felt like I'd been run over by a truck. I was pleased to have won the prize but I felt that there was something wrong in wallowing around in a showing off or something like that. Then the years go on, you know, and you think, Bike, I was such a fool. And then I was given this second chance for true history of the Kelly gang, I really celebrated it. I was really I was very, very, very happy.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean I remember in those years we used to go to in Melbourne to Stockholm racing and they had racing fuel that had a very heady smelter. I think was it methyl benzene or something like that and so in a funny way you were sort of drunk on that smell and when you came out you really thought that you could be revving your engine and carrying on like a young idiot. Well reading Faulkner and Joyce was the sort of equivalent sort of thing. You're getting just madly excited at the possibility of what you could do.”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a little more complicated or a little more obvious in the sense that I certainly fell far from university into an advertising agency and found I fell amongst writers or people who were writing at nights and at weekends and I began to read all at the same time and to discover at that time William Faulkner say I couldn't have imagined anything like that even existed in the world and to read this sort of jewel like language and this man also giving voice to the voiceless just made me sort of drunk and I was determined that I would do exactly the same thing and of course I'm somebody that read nothing pretty much. I was very foolish and very ignorant but protected by that ignorance I marched ahead”
2008-06-20 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Carey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source