Jim Crace Quotes

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

Many people think that it is important to have a title before you begin writing the book, but I think you should never sit around waiting for the right title to strike before you start writing. Crack on with the story, put in the hard work, and the title will come eventually.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.

I started writing, or rather, thinking, stories as a child, and at that time the reason was very clear.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

I feel like I've got a novel in me somewhere, but that's something... I was just talking to a buddy of mine about it, who's a writer as well, and he's nearly done with his first novel, and it's taken him 11, 12 years to do it. And I can totally understand; it's a long process.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked.

I never thought about writing a novel until I was 13, and that happened by chance. I was on school holidays, and I was bored, and I thought I just wanted to do something to occupy myself instead of asking, 'What can I do, mum? Entertain me.' I started, and it really just took over, and I realised, 'Wow, this is an amazing experience.'

I used to write stories a lot because you had to fill your hours some other way than watching television. So my imagination was vivid, and I used to write a lot of stories. I wrote a novel, which I still have, which is so awful.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.