Top 97 Quotes & Sayings by Jim Crace - Page 2

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.

Lots of people hate my stuff.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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'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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life, but 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.

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

My father had osteomyelitis-his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder ... . But the amputation of a Stone Age man called Leaf, a stoneworker, does not relate to my father at all.

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

I was captivated by Sherrie Flick's meticulous and intelligent study of Margaret and Vivette, and the men they share. Reconsidering Happiness is a courageously intimate novel about the young women of modern America, their friendships, their betrayals, and their anxious cravings for everything from sex to pastry.

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

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

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

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