A biography for Jim Cracehasn’t been written yet.
“I've never scared anybody in my life.”
“In the U.K., a lot of writers won't show up to support activist issues because they figure they're already repairing the world. I don't want to be one of those people.”
“When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.”
“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 feel the political failings of the U.S.A. are presidential in length, but the aspirant narrative of the States is millennial in length.”
“After 25 years sitting on my own in a room, I was looking for a more companionable job and wanted to work more collaboratively. I've also been very lucky in my career, with good advances and multibook deals. But there is some extent to which I worried that I was writing for the contract and not for the impulse of the thing itself.”
“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 didn't go to university straight after school. I went at night.”
“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.”
“The western view of Christ is usually of a stainless being with fair hair who appears to have come from Oslo.”
“Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors, and their toes are going to curl up.”
“We're all blemished. Yet we do love and are loved.”
“I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.”
“You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.”
“Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.”
“I felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage.”