That's the way it is: life inculdes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not… — 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
