Graham Swift

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

— Graham Swift

People die when curiosity goes.

— Graham Swift

I don't reread my books.

— Graham Swift

Literature is the voice of the human heart.

— Graham Swift

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

— Graham Swift

“Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.”

— Graham Swift

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

— 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

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

— 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

My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.

— Graham Swift

There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon…

— Graham Swift

In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on.…

— 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

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

— Graham Swift

What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with…

— Graham Swift

Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying…

— 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

Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel.…

— Graham Swift

Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel.…

— Graham Swift

“A friend of his entered the restaurant, looking too, for whatever reason, a little frail. The was an exchange of token 'how…

— Graham Swift

One of the things that probably drew me to writing was that it was something you could get on with by yourself.…

— Graham Swift

It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the…

— 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

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

You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else…

— 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

“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

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the…

— 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

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

— Graham Swift

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

— 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