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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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Graham Swift
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 4
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Graham Colin Swift
Graham Colin Swift FRSL
Came
Austerity
Class
Mentor
Family
Lower
Way
Artistic
Time
Potential
Became
Writer
Postwar
Middle
Budding

More quotes by Graham Swift

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I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.
Graham Swift
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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
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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.
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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
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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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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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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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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
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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
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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 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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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 don't reread my books.
Graham Swift
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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
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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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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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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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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