Zitat des Tages von Jim Crace:
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.
I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.
Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much.
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.
I was sick and tired of reading other people's epigraphs. They all seemed to be in ancient Greek, middle French or, when they were translated, they never seemed to relate to the book at hand. Basically, they seemed to be there just to baffle you and to impress you with how smart the writer is.
I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.
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.
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.
I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.
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.
When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.
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.
I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.
If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.
Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.
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.
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.
I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.
You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.
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.
Lots of people hate my stuff.
I should have been kinder when I was younger.
I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.
My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.
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.
I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.
There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.
There is no comparison. The American landscape is so much more dangerous. They have real snakes, mountain lions, bears; we only have adders, and they're more frightened of us than we are of them.
