Quote

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

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
Even
Archetypal
Arguably
Upbringing
Opposite
Opposites
Absolutely
Writer

More quotes by Graham Swift

Image
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
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
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
I don't reread my books.
Graham Swift
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Literature is the voice of the human heart.
Graham Swift
Image
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
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
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
What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
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
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
Image
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
Image
When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.
Graham Swift
Image
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
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 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
I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.
Graham Swift
Image
Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.
Graham Swift