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
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.
Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.
mother memories children
My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.
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.
country strong children
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 sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?
people looks expecting
When people aren't expecting to be seen, they look their truest.
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.
past wish lost
What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
art clever real
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 that we all use and to make amazing things occur.
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.