Graham Swift Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.”

“My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.”

“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.”

“Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.”

“All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.”

“All novelists must form their personal pacts in some way with the slowness of their craft. There are some who demand of themselves a 'rate of production,' for whom it's a matter of pride to complete, say, a book every year.”

“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?”

“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.”

“I tend to begin with what you might call the very small world of personal life. But I am certainly interested in how that small, intimate world connects or doesn't connect with a larger world.”

“I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it means they don't have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.”