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.
Interpretation
Using the past as inspiration allows for creative freedom and innovation in storytelling.
Peter Carey's quote emphasizes the importance of drawing from historical events and experiences to create art, specifically in novel writing. While he acknowledges the necessity of research, he suggests that true creativity lies in transforming well-known narratives into new and compelling stories, thus allowing writers the freedom to invent and explore beyond the conventional understanding of the past.
In practice
An author might quote this to inspire fellow writers at a literary workshop.
Our 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
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.
Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.
The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.
It was only after a while, after photographing mines and clear-cutting of forests in Maine, that I realized I was looking at the components of photography itself. Photography uses paper made from trees, water, metals, and chemistry. In a way, I was looking at all these things that feed into photography.
The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.
Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.
A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.
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