Quotes from Jim Crace

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.

I've never scared anybody in my life.

I'm a very secretive person.

I don't have any sense of an audience when I'm writing. I don't consider the audience. Because all I'm interested in is the problem on the page.

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.

I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.

I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.

I'm not thinking when I'm writing, 'How's this going to read?' Or, 'What percentage of the audience is going to stay with me?' The thing itself is what gives me pleasure. Sometimes stuff just falls onto the page so beautifully and happily that it's deeply satisfying. It's selfish!

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.

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.

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.

The Commonwealth Prize is about celebrating the Commonwealth and the special relationship we have with the ex-colonies - which is part guilt and part warmth - and the Booker Prize isn't an essential part of that, but it is part of that.

My father had osteomyelitis-his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder ... . But the amputation of a Stone Age man called Leaf, a stoneworker, does not relate to my father at all.

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.

The western view of Christ is usually of a stainless being with fair hair who appears to have come from Oslo.

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.

English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.

I have, I must admit, despised the English countryside for much of my life - despised it and avoided it for its want of danger and adventure.

I've been very lucky with prizes. But the thing about prizes is that, when you talk about a prize-winning author, you can be talking about one that is well-regarded but doesn't sell any books.

There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.

crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.

These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.

Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming.

The mood has changed. It's heavier. We were liquid; now we're stones.