QUOTES by Jim Crace
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
Inside, Penlee House is without pretension. It is a space that knows its limitations and its strengths - and makes the most of them.
Quote by -Jim Crace
I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
Part of me feels that I'm letting people down by not being as interesting as my books.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
The western view of Christ is usually of a stainless being with fair hair who appears to have come from Oslo.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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!
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace
As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.
Quote by -Jim Crace
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.
Quote by -Jim Crace