Jim Crace

Writer

1946-03-01

Quotes by Jim Crace

• You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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