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

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
Writer
Even
Archetypal
Arguably
Upbringing
Opposite
Opposites
Absolutely

More quotes by Graham Swift

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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
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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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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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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 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 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
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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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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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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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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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Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.
Graham Swift
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I don't reread my books.
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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Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.
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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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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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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What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
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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When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.
Graham Swift