112 Quotes by Graham Swift

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.

We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of combustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn’t it?

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.

I like the world we’ve got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

When something’s one thing, it’s not another.

There are no compasses for journeying in time.

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.

And there’s no saying what heady potions we won’t concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won’t imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.

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