For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

I know the money is important, but, actually, the validation of your career that prizes give is what you really want. But the money is fabulous, too.

- Jim Crace

I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.

- Jim Crace

I invent words you think you've heard - spray hopper or swag beetle.

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

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

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

I didn't go to university straight after school. I went at night.

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

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

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace

The problems of the world are not going to be engaged with and solved in Faversham, they're going to be sorted out in cities like Birmingham.

- Jim Crace

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.

- Jim Crace