Jim Crace Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.
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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've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.
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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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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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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 like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.
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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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Lots of people hate my stuff.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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We're all blemished. Yet we do love and are loved.