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
amusing bizarre cowardly fists instead people stories
My tongue is what I used instead of my fists because I was a small and cowardly young man. Amusing people with stories and being bizarre with words was my way of getting out of fixes.
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.
brought flat north south virtually
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.
stopped
I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.
people
Part of me feels that I'm letting people down by not being as interesting as my books.
Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much.
consciousness human narrative played thousands time trick
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.
affected creature debates destroyed narrative
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.
goes
When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.
solved sorted
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.
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.
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.