Jim Crace Quotes
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Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.
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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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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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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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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 invent words you think you've heard - spray hopper or swag beetle.
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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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I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.
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Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.
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I didn't go to university straight after school. I went at night.
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I have, I must admit, despised the English countryside for much of my life - despised it and avoided it for its want of danger and adventure.
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I'm interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion.
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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 know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.
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Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.
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I have tested my nerve by reaching a little too closely toward a lengthy alligator on the Gulf Coast and a saucer-sized tarantula in a Houston car park.