Jim Crace Quotes
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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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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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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 never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.
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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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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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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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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 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 have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.
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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've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.
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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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You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.
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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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Lots of people hate my stuff.
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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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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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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 like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.
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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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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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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.