Graham Swift quotes

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting. (Graham Swift)
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. View quote
Graham Swift
My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort. View quote
Graham Swift
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. View quote
Graham Swift
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.' View quote
Graham Swift
I had a fear of becoming anything, a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor, but if you become a doctor, that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition. View quote
Graham Swift
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. View quote
Graham Swift
I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it. View quote
Graham Swift
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. View quote
Graham Swift
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. View quote
Graham Swift
Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself. (Graham Swift)
People die when curiosity goes. View quote
Graham Swift
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. View quote
Graham Swift
Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow. View quote
Graham Swift
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. View quote
Graham Swift
My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite. View quote
Graham Swift
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. View quote
Graham Swift
I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London. View quote
Graham Swift
It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed. View quote
Graham Swift
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. View quote
Graham Swift
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)
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. View quote
Graham Swift
I don't reread my books. View quote
Graham Swift
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. View quote
Graham Swift
When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading. View quote
Graham Swift