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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Jim Crace Quotes

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

– Jim Crace

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

– Jim Crace

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

– 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 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.

– 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’m a very secretive person.

– Jim Crace

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

– 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

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

– 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

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

– 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 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.

– 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

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

– 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

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

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

– Jim Crace

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

– 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

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 should have been kinder when I was younger.

– Jim Crace

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

– Jim Crace

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.

– Jim Crace

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

– Jim Crace

The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks.

– 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

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

There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.

– Jim Crace

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