Jim Crace Quotes
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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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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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I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.
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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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Lots of people hate my stuff.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The Commonwealth Prize is about celebrating the Commonwealth and the special relationship we have with the ex-colonies - which is part guilt and part warmth - and the Booker Prize isn't an essential part of that, but it is part of that.
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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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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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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.
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You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.
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The celebrity sense of writers is something which is very tempting... But the enthusiasm comes from the fact that it's such a natural activity, storytelling.
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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.
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My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.
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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.