Top 55 Jim Crace Quotes

Even though the method of ‘Harvest’ was a historical novel, its intentions were that of a modern novel. I’m asking you to think about land being seized in Brazil by soya barons. It’s also a novel about immigration.

Lots of people hate my stuff.

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.

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

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.

Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of ‘the Muse’ nor the presence of ‘the block’ should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book.

Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.

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.

My tongue is what I used instead of my fists because I was a small and cowardly young man. Amusing people with stories and being bizarre with words was my way of getting out of fixes.

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 stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

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.

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.

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

I was sick and tired of reading other people’s epigraphs. They all seemed to be in ancient Greek, middle French or, when they were translated, they never seemed to relate to the book at hand. Basically, they seemed to be there just to baffle you and to impress you with how smart the writer is.

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.

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 felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage.

In the U.K., a lot of writers won’t show up to support activist issues because they figure they’re already repairing the world. I don’t want to be one of those people.

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

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

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

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.

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

I come from a working-class background where I was much more likely to read socialist books and leaflets than Bronte or Dickens – neither of whom I’ve yet read.

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.

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’m an atheist – a good old North Korean-style atheist.

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.

When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.

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.

I’m not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

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

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.

I’ve got a big, long list of stuff you’re entitled to hate about my books.

Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors, and their toes are going to curl up.

I feel the political failings of the U.S.A. are presidential in length, but the aspirant narrative of the States is millennial in length.

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.

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

I’ve never scared anybody in my life.

I am not – thank heavens – one of those ‘driven’ writers who spend a fortnight buckled with empty fright over an untouched page only to wake at two in the morning feverish with paragraphs.

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.

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.

I’m a matter-of-fact, office-hours writer.

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.

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

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.

The western view of Christ is usually of a stainless being with fair hair who appears to have come from Oslo.

Privately, I’m thrilled with what I do, but publicly, I hold it in disdain.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.