Graham Swift
Graham Swift
Graham Colin Swift FRSLis an English writer. Born in London, England, he was educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth4 May 1949
doctors might fields
I had a fear of becoming anything, a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor, but if you become a doctor, that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition.
writing get-away impulse
Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.
hate london feels
Of course there are times when I hate London, but equally there are times when I can walk 'round a corner and I really feel that this is my place.
book
I don't reread my books.
sound london
I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.
offering views people
If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.
opposites upbringing
My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.
years months novel
Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.
summer sky names
I share my name with an aerobatic bird that can whiz across a whole summer sky in seconds. A swift is so equipped for speed that it can scarcely cope with being stationary.
humble land progress
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 I the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.
space water tissues
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 now nor here.
dates fictional lives offered soon thrill
There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon dates and it's never enough.
form livelihood paid threaten work writers
The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.
few germ line might mostly prevent stopping theory time
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 I've mostly done what I want to do.' But how could you ever prevent a few years down the line some germ of an idea getting at you and you've got to do it again?