Quotes by Graham Swift

About Graham Swift:

Graham Colin Swift FRSL is an English writer. Born in London, England, he was educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

Graham Swift

With a gentle pressure, our lips met. His hands slipped more firmly about me, and I held myself back, not afraid, but wanting to feel everything slowly as I leaned in, tasting the wine on him, feeling the warmth of his body pressing into mine, breath...

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

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

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

Graham Swift

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 plan...

Graham Swift

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

Graham Swift

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 s...

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.

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

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

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

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 spe...

Graham Swift

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameGraham Swift
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • AliasesGraham Colin Swift
  • BornMay 4, 1949
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • WorksShuttlecock; Waterland; Last Orders
  • AwardsJames Tait Black Memorial Prize; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize