Jim Crace Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.
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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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We're all blemished. Yet we do love and are loved.
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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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After 25 years sitting on my own in a room, I was looking for a more companionable job and wanted to work more collaboratively. I've also been very lucky in my career, with good advances and multibook deals. But there is some extent to which I worried that I was writing for the contract and not for the impulse of the thing itself.
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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 want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.
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There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.
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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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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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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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I've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.
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As a Midlander and a big walker, I'd always loved ridge and furrow fields, the plough-marked land as it was when it was enclosed. It is the landscape giving you a story of lives that ended with the arrival of sheep.
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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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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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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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I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.
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Almost everyone who's been to primary school in Britain has had towels put on their heads to play the shepherds in the nativity play.
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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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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.