Graham Swift Quotes

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

Nature, Secret, Purpose

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

Book, Pride, Matter

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

Time, Person, Ways

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

Family, Time, Writer

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

Mind, Thinking, While

I don't reread my books.
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.
Graham Swift

Life, Fear, Human

I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.
Graham Swift

Sound, London, Respond

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

Whole, Bird, Sky

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

Life, Small, Personal

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

Happy, Everything, Away

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

Find, Begin, Ordinary

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

Find, Special, Stuff

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

Tomorrow, Wrong, Read

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

Work, Trust, Time

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.
Graham Swift

Writing, May, Same

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

Beautiful, Light, Become

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

Great, Mother, Children

My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.
Graham Swift

Writer, Opposite, Upbringing

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

Work, Experience, Rather

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

Hate, Place, Times

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

Yourself, Writing, Means

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

Writing, Away, Actually

People die when curiosity goes.
Graham Swift

Die, Goes, Curiosity

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

Saying, Mad, Knew

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Biography

Nationality: British

Type: Author

Born: May 4, 1949

Links

Find on Amazon: Graham Swift

Cite this Page: Citation

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