Graham Swift quotes

Graham Swift is a British author renowned for his evocative novels exploring memory, history, and human relationships. Notable works include "Waterland" and "Last Orders," both critically acclaimed for their narrative depth. He has received prestigious literary prizes and is considered one of the leading contemporary writers in Britain. Here are 26 of his quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graham Swift

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

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

People die when curiosity goes.

Graham Swift

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

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

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

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

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

Graham Swift

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

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

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

I don't reread my books.

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

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

Graham Swift