Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Graham Swift
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 4
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Graham Colin Swift
Graham Colin Swift FRSL
Always
Reliable
World
Premises
Hide
Illusion
Second
Fall
Doe
Back
Premise

More quotes by Graham Swift

Image
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 planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.
Graham Swift
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I am struck by the way people behave on the Tube. They look at each other beadily and inquisitively, and something goes on in their thoughts which must be equivalent to the way dogs and other animals, when they meet, sniff each other's arses and nuzzle each other's fur.
Graham Swift
Image
Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.
Graham Swift
Image
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
Image
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.
Graham Swift
Image
Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.
Graham Swift
Image
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
Image
When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.
Graham Swift
Image
What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
Graham Swift
Image
If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer.
Graham Swift
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.
Graham Swift
Image
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
Image
Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.
Graham Swift
Image
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
Image
I don't reread my books.
Graham Swift