Jim Crace Quotes

Every time I had a book come out, I'm like, 'Is it going to be number one?'

Once you've published a few books, you drag around this ball and chain of a back list. All the evidence of how few you've sold is there. I think a lot of writers my age have this strange experience of going from would-be to has-been.

I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!

Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'

Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.

No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.

We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.'

I've been asked too many times to write a book by the fans.

That's very nice if they want to publish you, but don't pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.

I'll bet you $10 right now that there are an awful lot of literary writers who started a long time ago and now they find themselves in this place where secretly they feel trapped. And you know what they really read for fun? They read crime fiction.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don't know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

When you're a mid-list writer, it pays to write fast.

I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.

What I wish is that people would look beyond the tribbles and see I've written some other books that I really would like people to notice. There's 'The Man Who Folded Himself,' there's 'The Martian Child,' which is about my son and the adoption. There's 'The War Against The Chtorr,' which is my magnum opus, my great epic story.

I think it's great when writers get recognition; it doesn't happen very often. I just don't want that writer to be me. Let it be Aaron Sorkin or, you know, somebody good.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

Writers are not celebrities, so you don't expect to walk down the street and hear, 'Oh my God, there's Sylvia Day.' You prefer to be anonymous.

One of the things you want as a successful writer is the anonymity.