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
almost avoid bitterness bound deliver retiring
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.
adore entertain happened
I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.
beneath english thousand
You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.
failings
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.
telling
Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.
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Storytelling enables us to play out decisions before we make them, to plan routes before we take them, to work out the campaign before we start the war, to rehearse the phrases we're going to use to please or placate our wives and husbands.
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.
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.
history natural obsessed tone
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.
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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.
believe consciousness rainbows
As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.
certainly
I liked journalism and thought it was important, certainly more important than fiction. I'd probably still be doing it if I hadn't been elbowed out.
based book distance felt good happy health heart marriage novels subject wants
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.
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.