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 stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.
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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’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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I'm an atheist - a good old North Korean-style atheist.
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I've never scared anybody in my life.
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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 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 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 a matter-of-fact, office-hours writer.
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You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.
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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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English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.
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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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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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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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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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I'm a very secretive person.
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Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much.
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I come from a working-class background where I was much more likely to read socialist books and leaflets than Bronte or Dickens - neither of whom I've yet read.
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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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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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Privately, I'm thrilled with what I do, but publicly, I hold it in disdain.