Quote

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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Graham Swift
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 4
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Graham Colin Swift
Graham Colin Swift FRSL
Months
Novel
Coming
Rather
Experience
Begun
Work
Novels
Years
Slow
Ahead

More quotes by 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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Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.
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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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
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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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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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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 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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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 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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Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.
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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My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.
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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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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What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
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