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’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
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. – 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
I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes. – 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
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. – 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. – Jim Crace
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. – 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
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. – 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
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
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. – 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
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
English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas. – 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
I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart. – Jim Crace
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. – 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
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. – Jim Crace
