Words matter. These are the best Graham Swift Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
People die when curiosity goes.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.
I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.
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.
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.
Today’s news, which may be yesterday’s anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.
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.
My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer’s upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.
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.
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.
