Jim Crace

I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.

I'm not that well-versed in literary theory - I don't know what it is.

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.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

'Russian Ark,' I adore - I almost cried at the end of that film, it's so beautiful.