Graham Swift Quotes

Quotes about:

• That's the way it is: life inculdes 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

  Space, Water, Tissues

  1983 Waterland, ch.8.

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Clever, Real

  "Triumph of the common man" by John O'Mahony, www.theguardian.com. March 1, 2003.

  18 Copy quote

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

  Graham Swift

  Past, Wish, Lost

  Graham Swift (1991). “Waterland”, Simon & Schuster

  8 Copy quote

• Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

  Graham Swift

  Children, Memories, Fall

  8 Copy quote

• Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?

  Graham Swift

  Country, Strong, Children

  Graham Swift (1991). “Waterland”, Simon & Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.

  Graham Swift

  Children, People, Curiosity

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Doctors, Becoming, Might

  "'How did I end up becoming a novelist?'" by Edward Marriott, www.theguardian.com. February 28, 2009.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Taken, Air

  7 Copy quote

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

  Graham Swift

  Thinking, Ordinary, Extraordinary

  4 Copy quote

• Literature is the voice of the human heart.

  Graham Swift

  Wise, Heart, Voice

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Novelists, Levels

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Special, Ordinary, World

  7 Copy quote

• Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

  Graham Swift

  Graham Swift (2012). “Ever After”, p.138, Pan Macmillan

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Summer, Sky, Names

  "Graham Swift: 'As a novelist, I'm in for the long haul'". www.theguardian.com. March 11, 2017.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Mind, Sitting

  "Triumph of the common man" by John O'Mahony, www.theguardian.com. March 1, 2003.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Graham Swift

  Writing, Impulse, Get Away

  4 Copy quote

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

  Graham Swift

  Sweet, Rushing, Sometimes

  Graham Swift (2012). “Tomorrow”, p.84, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Mad, Littles

  Graham Swift (1991). “Waterland”, Simon & Schuster

  6 Copy quote

• 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. 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

  Memories, Writing, Emotional

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Years, Months, Novel

  5 Copy quote

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

  Graham Swift

  People, Looks, Expecting

  Graham Swift (2012). “The Sweet Shop Owner”, p.234, Pan Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Cells, Long

  Graham Swift (2012). “Making an Elephant: Writing from Within”, p.56, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Secret, Purpose

  Graham Swift (2012). “Shuttlecock”, p.78, Pan Macmillan

  95 Copy quote

• 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

  Dog, Animal, People

  Graham Swift (2012). “Shuttlecock”, p.23, Pan Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

• 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, Years

  5 Copy quote

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