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.

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.

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.

I like the world we’ve got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

Today’s news, which may be yesterday’s anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

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.

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

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.

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.

People die when curiosity goes.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Literature is the voice of the human heart.

When people aren’t expecting to be seen, they look their truest.

My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer’s upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.

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.

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.

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?

I don’t reread my books.

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.

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.

Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

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.

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.