Graham Swift Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“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 mad.'”

“It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed.”

“London is like no other city I know in its ability to become beautiful. You can suddenly turn a corner and there are odd moments - of light, of weather.”

“There is a certain inescapable attachment. If you are born somewhere and circumstances don't take you away from it, then you grow up and remain within it.”

“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.”

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

“Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.”

“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.”

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