Jim Crace Quotes
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If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.
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I felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage.
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I've never scared anybody in my life.
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I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.
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Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book.
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I feel the political failings of the U.S.A. are presidential in length, but the aspirant narrative of the States is millennial in length.
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I'm an atheist - a good old North Korean-style atheist.
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I was sick and tired of reading other people's epigraphs. They all seemed to be in ancient Greek, middle French or, when they were translated, they never seemed to relate to the book at hand. Basically, they seemed to be there just to baffle you and to impress you with how smart the writer is.
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I'm a matter-of-fact, office-hours writer.
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I’m not interested in truths, like drawing an accurate picture of the real world. I’m interested in exploring the verities of the human condition.
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You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.
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I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
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When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.
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English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.
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The western view of Christ is usually of a stainless being with fair hair who appears to have come from Oslo.
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Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much.
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In the U.K., a lot of writers won't show up to support activist issues because they figure they're already repairing the world. I don't want to be one of those people.
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Even though the method of 'Harvest' was a historical novel, its intentions were that of a modern novel. I'm asking you to think about land being seized in Brazil by soya barons. It's also a novel about immigration.
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When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.
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Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.
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My tongue is what I used instead of my fists because I was a small and cowardly young man. Amusing people with stories and being bizarre with words was my way of getting out of fixes.
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Privately, I'm thrilled with what I do, but publicly, I hold it in disdain.
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I'm not thinking when I'm writing, 'How's this going to read?' Or, 'What percentage of the audience is going to stay with me?' The thing itself is what gives me pleasure. Sometimes stuff just falls onto the page so beautifully and happily that it's deeply satisfying. It's selfish!
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When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.