Graham Swift Quotes

50 quotes in 910 categories

• People die when curiosity goes.
• 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…
• When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to…
• What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
• 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…
• When people aren't expecting to be seen, they look their truest.
• 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…
• What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future…
• 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…
• 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 area…
• I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.
• 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…
• Literature is the voice of the human heart.
• The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language…
• 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…
• 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…
• I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way…
• 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.
• You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else is in charge,…
• I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at…

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