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
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 if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A… — Graham Swift Copy Share
“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
