Jim Crace
Jim Crace
James "Jim" Craceis an award-winning English writer. His novels include Quarantine, which was judged Whitbread Novel of 1998, and Harvest, which won the 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth1 March 1946
curl happiness pitching toes
Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors, and their toes are going to curl up.
kept likely spectators visitors
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.
entitled list
I've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.
amateur area history natural says
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.
future
I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.
itself knocking narrative starts
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.
careers gets hundred immensely
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.
basically entity stands work writers
Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
goes
When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.
balloon becomes carries fills hold nerve pushing trust
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.
heads nativity school shepherds towels
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.
ahead british city closest counties deep fear foul hiking historic home mud narrow whether
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.
beneath english thousand
You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.
age based convention mirrors wants
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.