Graham Swift Quotes

#1. Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

Graham Swift

#2. When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

Graham Swift

#3. People die when curiosity goes.

Graham Swift

#4. The idea of stopping is not unmeaningful to me. I think there might be a time when, in theory at least, you'd say, 'Well I've mostly done what I want to do.' But how could you ever prevent a few years down the line some germ of an idea getting at you and you've got to do it again?

Graham Swift

#5. All novelists must form their personal pacts in some way with the slowness of their craft. There are some who demand of themselves a 'rate of production,' for whom it's a matter of pride to complete, say, a book every year.

Graham Swift

#6. There is a certain inescapable attachment. If you are born somewhere and circumstances don't take you away from it, then you grow up and remain within it.

Graham Swift

#7. There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon dates and it's never enough.

Graham Swift

#8. I share my name with an aerobatic bird that can whiz across a whole summer sky in seconds. A swift is so equipped for speed that it can scarcely cope with being stationary.

Graham Swift

#9. Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon ...

Graham Swift

#10. A feeble fire is worse than an empty grate.

Graham Swift

#11. What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

Graham Swift

#12. I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.

Graham Swift

#13. His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed all the things that followed her death. Including all this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.

Graham Swift

#14. The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

Graham Swift

#15. When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

Graham Swift

#16. My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.

Graham Swift

#17. It makes you feel sort of cheap and titchy. Like it's looking down at you, saying, I'm Canterbury Cathedral, who the hell are you?

Graham Swift

#18. The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

Graham Swift

#19. I don't reread my books.

Graham Swift

#20. People die when curiosity goes.People have to find out, people have to know. How can there be any true revolution till we know what we're made of? 830

Graham Swift

#21. My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.

Graham Swift

#22. The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.

Graham Swift

#23. How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.

Graham Swift

#24. If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive
then don't be a writer.

Graham Swift

#25. I'm not a writer who looks for the fantastic and the sensational. I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

Graham Swift

#26. That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.

Graham Swift

#27. Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved.

Graham Swift

#28. And I didn't know I loved her till I'd dreamt of her. I didn't know it was the real thing until an illusion had signalled it.

Graham Swift

#29. I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it means they don't have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.

Graham Swift

#30. I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.

Graham Swift

#31. And though, indeed, it only happened once, it's gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there's a memory for them to happen in ...

Graham Swift

#32. What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?

Graham Swift

#33. How we forgive narrowness of mind, when it accompanies largeness of heart. Yet no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling.

Graham Swift

#34. He demands an explanation.

Graham Swift

#35. There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on
a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

Graham Swift

#36. Of course there are times when I hate London, but equally there are times when I can walk 'round a corner and I really feel that this is my place.

Graham Swift

#37. The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.

Graham Swift

#38. As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.

Graham Swift

#39. Or realism. Or realism. If history shows that the scale of human calamity increases. If the evidence of history corroborates what my students sense by intuition -

Graham Swift

#40. I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

Graham Swift

#41. All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.

Graham Swift

#42. What is a history teacher? He's someone who teaches mistakes.

Graham Swift

#43. Reality's not strange, not unexpected.Reality doesn't reside in the hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens.

Graham Swift

#44. When something's one thing, it's not another.

Graham Swift

#45. And there's no saying what heady potions we won't concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won't imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.

Graham Swift

#46. I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.

Graham Swift

#47. There are no compasses for journeying in time.

Graham Swift

#48. Unfortunately writers take a very small part of the profit on their books, and I think in the e-book world there is a real danger they will take even less, unless they are vigilant and robust about protecting their own interests.

Graham Swift

#49. I am struck by the way people behave on the Tube. They look at each other beadily and inquisitively, and something goes on in their thoughts which must be equivalent to the way dogs and other animals, when they meet, sniff each other's arses and nuzzle each other's fur.

Graham Swift

#50. History is a yarn. And can I deny that what I wanted all along was not some golden nugget that history would at last yield up, but History itself: the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the dispeller of fears of the dark?

Graham Swift

#51. In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

Graham Swift

#52. There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.

Graham Swift

#53. Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

Graham Swift

#54. And so long as we have this itch for explanations, must we not always carry round with us this cumbersome but precious bag of clues called History? Another definition: Man, the animal which demands an explanation, the animal which asks Why.

Graham Swift

#55. If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

Graham Swift

#56. Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

Graham Swift

#57. You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else is in charge, because there is a part of the system above you which you don't know, you don't question it, you even distrust your own doubts.

Graham Swift

#58. Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

Graham Swift

#59. Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath, a holocaust, an Armageddon? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing?

Graham Swift

#60. London is like no other city I know in its ability to become beautiful. You can suddenly turn a corner and there are odd moments - of light, of weather.

Graham Swift

#61. One of the things that probably drew me to writing was that it was something you could get on with by yourself. Publishing means going public. But the actual activity could scarcely be more invisible. And private.

Graham Swift

#62. Literature is the voice of the human heart.

Graham Swift

#63. Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'

Graham Swift

#64. When it comes down to it, Matthew was just another disillusioned idealist, an over-reactive Hamlet type--couldn't take it that the world was real.

Graham Swift

#65. I tend to begin with what you might call the very small world of personal life. But I am certainly interested in how that small, intimate world connects or doesn't connect with a larger world.

Graham Swift

#66. When people aren't expecting to be seen, they look their truest.

Graham Swift