Jim Crace quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jim Crace

Jim Crace Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jim Crace on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

Lots of people hate my stuff.

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

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

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

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 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.

Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.

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.

There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

And it seems I ought to scatter too. Perhaps at once. It's always better to turn your back on the gale than press your face against it.

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

I should have been kinder when I was younger.

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

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

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

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

English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.

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

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

These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.

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

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

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

I've never scared anybody in my life.

I've never finished anything by Dickens.

I'm a very secretive person.

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