I’m not a writer who looks for the fantastic and the sensational. I like the world we’ve got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff. Graham Swift Read Quote
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. Graham Swift Read Quote
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. Graham Swift Read Quote
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. Graham Swift Read Quote
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. Graham Swift Read Quote
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. Graham Swift Read Quote
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. Graham Swift Read Quote
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. Graham Swift Read Quote
I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it. Graham Swift Read Quote
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. Graham Swift Read Quote
