Jim Crace Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Jim Crace Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Jim Crace Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

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.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

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.

Jim Crace

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.

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.

Jim Crace

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jim Crace

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.

Jim Crace

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.

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.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

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.

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.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

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.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

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

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.

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.

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!

Jim Crace

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.

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.

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.

Jim Crace

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

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.

Jim Crace

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.

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.

Jim Crace

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.

Jim Crace

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.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

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.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

I’ve never finished anything by Dickens.

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.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

I invent words you think you’ve heard – spray hopper or swag beetle.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

I’ve never scared anybody in my life.

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.

Jim Crace

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.

Jim Crace

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.

Jim Crace

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.

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.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace

I should have been kinder when I was younger.

Jim Crace

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

Jim Crace