Graham Swift Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“People die when curiosity goes.”

“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.”

“The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.”

“In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.”

“One of the things that probably drew me to writing was that it was something you could get on with by yourself. Publishing means going public. But the actual activity could scarcely be more invisible. And private.”

“When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.”

“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.”

“I don't reread my books.”

“I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.”