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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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Graham Swift
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 4
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Graham Colin Swift
Graham Colin Swift FRSL
Never
Becoming
Condition
Life
Open
Defined
Attractions
Fear
Doctors
Specialist
Become
Field
Specialty
Anything
Entire
Specialists
Might
Fields
Attraction
Human
Conditions
Doctor
Humans
Writer
Entirely

More quotes by 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 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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What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
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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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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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 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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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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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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I don't reread my books.
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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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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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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Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.
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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Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.
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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Literature is the voice of the human heart.
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 people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.
Graham Swift