Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
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… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The idea of stopping is not unmeaningful to me. I think there might be a time when, in theory at least, you'd say, 'Well… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
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… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite. — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
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… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
“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. It’s progress… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
“And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.” — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write,… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
“But this would have been to ignore the young man of only twenty-five, who, for all his, by now, increasing and debilitating proneness to… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope.… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
