Jim Crace Quotes
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I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.
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I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.
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Everyone says I should write a natural history or landscape book because if I have an area of amateur expertise, it is in those things.
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I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.
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The problems of the world are not going to be engaged with and solved in Faversham, they're going to be sorted out in cities like Birmingham.
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For all the splendours of the world's greatest galleries, visitors are likely to be kept at arm's length, spectators of a world that can seem too rarefied to let them in.
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Even though my brother and I loved scrumping - we loved the act of climbing trees and grabbing fruit - there was always fear we would be caught. We feared we'd be imprisoned, sent to Australia.
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Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.
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I don't have any sense of an audience when I'm writing. I don't consider the audience. Because all I'm interested in is the problem on the page.
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You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.
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I liked journalism and thought it was important, certainly more important than fiction. I'd probably still be doing it if I hadn't been elbowed out.
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I've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.
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As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.
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Storytelling enables us to play out decisions before we make them, to plan routes before we take them, to work out the campaign before we start the war, to rehearse the phrases we're going to use to please or placate our wives and husbands.
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When people asked me what I did, I'd say, 'I work in publishing', and when they then say, 'What side of it?', I say, 'Supply' - no doubt leaving them to think I drive the books around in a van and deliver them.
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I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.
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I was brought up in a flat in North London - virtually the last building in London, because north of us was countryside all the way to the coast, and south of us was non-stop London for 20 miles.
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I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.
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We're all blemished. Yet we do love and are loved.
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Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
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Lots of people hate my stuff.
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Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.
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I'm very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I'm much less driven than they are. I don't wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don't suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.
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I'm not good at dialogue. I'm not good at holding a mirror up at a real world. I'm not good at believable characterisation.