Jim Crace Quotes

When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.

There is no remedy for death
or birth
except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

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.

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.

I'm not that well-versed in literary theory - I don't know what it is.

To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.

Crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.

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.

I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.

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.

Part of me feels that I'm letting people down by not being as interesting as my books.

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.

We only meet the God within our true selves through suffering. We seek the wilderness because in this solitude we can hear ourselves more clearly.

I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.

I'm not going to write any more novels. I don't want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don't want that.

On nights like this, when there is anxiety about, there is a glut of lovemaking. Then the moon is our dance master. He has us move in unison. He has us trill and carol in each other's ears until the stars themselves have swollen and ripened to our cries. As ever here, we find our consolations sowing seed.

While we're having all these debates about how the book is being destroyed by the Kindle, we have to remember that narrative will not be affected at all because it's part of our makeup as a creature on this planet.

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.

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.

I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.

If I talk about my father's funeral, as I did when I was promoting the last novel, 'Being Dead,' I'm not going to tell any lies, but there are certain things I'm not going to tell you, and I'm certainly not going to tell my grief.

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.

I'm an atheist - a good old North Korean-style atheist.

Inside, Penlee House is without pretension. It is a space that knows its limitations and its strengths - and makes the most of them.

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.

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.

I should have been kinder when I was younger.

You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.

We're all blemished. Yet we do love and are loved.

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.

As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.

I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.

Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming.

There's not a season set aside for pondering and reveries. It will not les us hesitate or rest; it does not wish us to stand back and comment on its comeliness or devise a song for it. It has no time to listen to our song. It only asks us not to tire in our hard work. It wants to see us leathery, our necks and fore-arms burnt as black as chimney oak; it wants to leave us thinned and sinewy from work. It taxes us from dawn to dusk, and torments us at night; that is the taxing that the thrush complains about. Our great task each and every year is to defend ourselves against hunger and defeat with implements and tools.

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.

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.

I didn't go to university straight after school. I went at night.

I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.

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.

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.

There's a convention that books are mirrors of the real world, but our fact-obsessed age also wants fiction to be factually based and trustworthy.

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.

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.

You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.

I've been very lucky with prizes. But the thing about prizes is that, when you talk about a prize-winning author, you can be talking about one that is well-regarded but doesn't sell any books.

I invent words you think you've heard - spray hopper or swag beetle.

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.

The mood has changed. It's heavier. We were liquid; now we're stones.

I know the money is important, but, actually, the validation of your career that prizes give is what you really want. But the money is fabulous, too.

I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.

I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.

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.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel ... you have to listen to it.

I'm a very secretive person.

For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.

When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative.

I'm not thinking when I'm writing, 'How's this going to read?' Or, 'What percentage of the audience is going to stay with me?' The thing itself is what gives me pleasure. Sometimes stuff just falls onto the page so beautifully and happily that it's deeply satisfying. It's selfish!

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.

Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much.

The dead leaves fly. They're cropped and gathered to the rich barn of the earth.

The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks.