Graham Swift Quotes

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Graham Swift

Profession : Author

Birth : May 4, 1949

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

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

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

People die when curiosity goes.

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.'

Graham Swift

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

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

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

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

Graham Swift

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

Graham Swift

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

I don't reread my books.

Graham Swift

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

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

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

Graham Swift

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

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

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

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

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