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
days flow ink pen quick straight stuff
The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. 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 to the page.
fantastic looks
I'm not a writer who looks for the fantastic and the sensational. I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.
people looks expecting
When people aren't expecting to be seen, they look their truest.
class mentor austerity
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 artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.
fall other-worlds doe
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 does not hide that its premise is illusion.
thinking ordinary extraordinary
I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.
thinking mind sitting
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 a desk.
thinking levels way
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 articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.
Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.
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?
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.
past wish lost
What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
sweet rushing sometimes
How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.
mother memories children
My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.