13 Jim Crace Quotes

Jim Crace quotes

1. I'm not interested in truths, like drawing an accurate picture of the real world. I'm interested in exploring the verities of the human condition.

1. Retiring from writing is not to retire from life, but 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.

2. Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors and their toes are going to curl up.

3. To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

4. There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

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

6. I was captivated by Sherrie Flick's meticulous and intelligent study of Margaret and Vivette, and the men they share. Reconsidering Happiness is a courageously intimate novel about the young women of modern America, their friendships, their betrayals, and their anxious cravings for everything from sex to pastry.

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

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

9. 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.

10. “There's not a season set aside for pondering and reveries. It will not les us hesitate or rest; it does not wish us to stand back and comment on its comeliness or devise a song for it. It has no time to listen to our song. It only asks us not to tire in our hard work. It wants to see us leathery, our necks and fore-arms burnt as black as chimney oak; it wants to leave us thinned and sinewy from work. It taxes us from dawn to dusk, and torments us at night; that is the taxing that the thrush complains about. Our great task each and every year is to defend ourselves against hunger and defeat with implements and tools.”

11. “Sometimes in matters of the heart words are not required. Are ill advised, in fact.”

12. “Any hawk looking down on the orchard's cloistered square, hoping for the titbit of a beetle or a mouse, would see a patterned canopy of trees, line on line, the orchard's melancholy solitude, the jewellery of leaves. It would see the backs of horses, the russet, apple-dotted grass, the saltire of two crossing paths worn smooth by centuries of feet, and two grey heads, swirling in a lover's dance, like blown seed husks caught up in an impish and exacting wind and with no telling when or where they'll come to ground again.”