Graham Swift Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Taken

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Robust, Unfortunately

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Complete, Contemporary

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Seeing, Dates

• 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.

  Graham Swift

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Within, Born

• The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. 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.

  Graham Swift

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Brain, Quick

• The novel that’s contemporary in the sense of being wholly ‘of now’ is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the ‘now’ with which they begin will be defunct by the time they’re finished.

  Graham Swift

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Contemporary, Wholly

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Stopping, Theory

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writers, Paid

• 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.

  Graham Swift

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pays, Elaborate

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Scarcely, Drew

• 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

  Topics in Ability

  Tags in Corner, Weather

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Labor, Compare

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Emotional, Shift

• 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.

  Graham Swift

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Magical, Sensational

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Maker, Purveyors

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Small, Interested

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Speed, Seconds

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Specialty, Writer

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Mentor, Potential

Graham Swift (41)

Birth:	4th May, 1949
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist

About

Graham Colin Swift was born in London, England. He is an English novelist. He earned a B.A. degree in 1970 and an M.A. degree in 1975 from Queen's College, Cambridge University. Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Last Orders and Waterland. He has written several novels include: The Sweet-Shop Owner, Shuttlecock(winner of the 1983 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), Waterland, Last Orders(winner of the 1996 Booker Prize and winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction), The Light of Day, Tomorrow, and Wish You Were Here.

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