112 Quotes by Graham Swift

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.