Quote

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

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Graham Swift
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 4
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Graham Colin Swift
Graham Colin Swift FRSL
Men
Madness
Wrote
Inside
Madman
Saying
Madmen
Knew
Sits
Littles
Sane
Little
Possibly
Every
Mad

More quotes by Graham Swift

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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
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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
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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.
Graham Swift
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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
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When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.
Graham Swift
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Literature is the voice of the human heart.
Graham Swift
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Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon.
Graham Swift
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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
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If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.
Graham Swift
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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
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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
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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
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Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.
Graham Swift
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My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.
Graham Swift
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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
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I don't reread my books.
Graham Swift
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Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.
Graham Swift
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Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.
Graham Swift
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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
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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