Graham Swift 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.

Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

People die when curiosity goes.

Literature is the voice of the human heart.

I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

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

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.

I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?

I don't reread my books.

And I didn't know I loved her till I'd dreamt of her. I didn't know it was the real thing until an illusion had signalled it.

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

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

If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

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

People die when curiosity goes.People have to find out, people have to know. How can there be any true revolution till we know what we're made of? 830

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

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

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

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …

And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.