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
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.
aware driven hours less pregnant share suffer text wake writers
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.
thrilled
Privately, I'm thrilled with what I do, but publicly, I hold it in disdain.
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.
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.
arrival ended land landscape lives
As a Midlander and a big walker, I'd always loved ridge and furrow fields, the plough-marked land as it was when it was enclosed. It is the landscape giving you a story of lives that ended with the arrival of sheep.
detailed invented mostly
I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
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.
bourgeois full metaphors rhythmic sinking
I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.