Jim Crace Quotes
-
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!
-
When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.
-
I know the money is important, but, actually, the validation of your career that prizes give is what you really want. But the money is fabulous, too.
-
For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.
-
I've never finished anything by Dickens.
-
Part of me feels that I'm letting people down by not being as interesting as my books.
-
Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors, and their toes are going to curl up.
-
I'm not going to write any more novels. I don't want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don't want that.
-
While we're having all these debates about how the book is being destroyed by the Kindle, we have to remember that narrative will not be affected at all because it's part of our makeup as a creature on this planet.
-
When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative.
-
There's a convention that books are mirrors of the real world, but our fact-obsessed age also wants fiction to be factually based and trustworthy.
-
I'm not that well-versed in literary theory - I don't know what it is.
-
The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks.
-
If I talk about my father's funeral, as I did when I was promoting the last novel, 'Being Dead,' I'm not going to tell any lies, but there are certain things I'm not going to tell you, and I'm certainly not going to tell my grief.
-
I should have been kinder when I was younger.
-
There is no comparison. The American landscape is so much more dangerous. They have real snakes, mountain lions, bears; we only have adders, and they're more frightened of us than we are of them.
-
I've been very lucky with prizes. But the thing about prizes is that, when you talk about a prize-winning author, you can be talking about one that is well-regarded but doesn't sell any books.
-
I am not - thank heavens - one of those 'driven' writers who spend a fortnight buckled with empty fright over an untouched page only to wake at two in the morning feverish with paragraphs.
-
I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.
-
Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.
-
Inside, Penlee House is without pretension. It is a space that knows its limitations and its strengths - and makes the most of them.
-
All the uncontrollable and unpredictable parts of my life - from the actual creation to my emotional responses to the finished book - I've succeeded in banishing to the office. And I think I'm happier for it.
-
I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.
-
I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.