Graham Swift

People die when curiosity goes.

— Graham Swift

“A feeble fire is worse than an empty grate.”

— Graham Swift

Literature is the voice of the human heart.

— Graham Swift

I don't reread my books.

— Graham Swift

“And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.”

— Graham Swift

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

— Graham Swift

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

— Graham Swift

“Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.”

— Graham Swift

“Why are the Fens flat? So God has a clear view...”

— Graham Swift

When people aren't expecting to be seen, they look their truest.

— Graham Swift

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

— Graham Swift

I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.

— Graham Swift

People die when curiosity goes.People have to find out, people have to know. How can there be any true revolution till we…

— Graham Swift

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To…

— Graham Swift

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

The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for…

— Graham Swift

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of…

— Graham Swift

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you…

— Graham Swift

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

— Graham Swift

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in…

— Graham Swift

“His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known…

— Graham Swift

The idea of stopping is not unmeaningful to me. I think there might be a time when, in theory at least, you'd…

— Graham Swift

I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was…

— Graham Swift

I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it…

— Graham Swift

The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There…

— Graham Swift

Unfortunately writers take a very small part of the profit on their books, and I think in the e-book world there is…

— Graham Swift

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers),…

— Graham Swift

I tend to begin with what you might call the very small world of personal life. But I am certainly interested in…

— Graham Swift

“And as for the Ellison Fellow's feelings towards Katherine Potter--to be honest, they involve a good deal of confusion. He reacts before…

— Graham Swift

“Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this…

— Graham Swift

“Life goes on. It doesn't go on. Yes, yes, I know, all we want in the end, we living, breathing creatures (am…

— Graham Swift

Pillow talk. It's how you know, it's how you tell, that something different, something special is happening: that this might even be…

— Graham Swift

“But this would have been to ignore the young man of only twenty-five, who, for all his, by now, increasing and debilitating…

— Graham Swift

“The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture—its only value to provide shade for the livestock—but it was…

— Graham Swift

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me…

— Graham Swift

“There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress, it doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away.…

— Graham Swift

I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.

— Graham Swift

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

— Graham Swift

“He was distrustful of happiness as some people fear heights or open spaces.”

— Graham Swift

Of course there are times when I hate London, but equally there are times when I can walk 'round a corner and…

— Graham Swift