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
dancing asking novelists
To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.
missing-someone missing missing-her
There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.
certain certainly last promoting talk
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.
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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.
dickens likely neither whom
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.
colleague friday good reach target weekend weekly word work
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.
empty fortnight fright heavens morning thank wake writers
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.
natural writers
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.
believable good holding
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.
bitter moaning people writers
I'm not going to write any more novels. I don't want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don't want that.
detailed invented mostly
I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
narrative
I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.
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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.
money prizes validation
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.