43+ Graham Swift Quotes On Politics, World And Friendship

Graham Swift is a British author who is best known for his novel Last Orders, which won the Booker Prize in 1996. He has written several other novels, including Waterland, Shuttlecock, and Tomorrow. His works often explore themes of memory, identity, and the past. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Graham Swift on love, politics, life.

Top 10 Graham Swift Quotes

1. 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.
2. Literature is the voice of the human heart.
3. People die when curiosity goes.
4. When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.
5. Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'
6. 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.
7. London is like no other city I know in its ability to become beautiful. You can suddenly turn a corner and there are odd moments - of light, of weather.
8. Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.
9. People die when curiosity goes.People have to find out, people have to know. How can there be any true revolution till we know what we're made of? 830
10. Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

Graham Swift Short Quotes

• I don't reread my books.
• When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.
• My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.
• My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.
• I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.
• I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.
• What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.
• Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

Graham Swift Quotes About Life

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer. — Graham Swift

That's the way it is: life inculdes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here. — Graham Swift

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting. — Graham Swift

Graham Swift Quotes About World

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon. — Graham Swift

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

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion. — Graham Swift

Graham Swift Quotes About People

I am struck by the way people behave on the Tube. They look at each other beadily and inquisitively, and something goes on in their thoughts which must be equivalent to the way dogs and other animals, when they meet, sniff each other's arses and nuzzle each other's fur. — Graham Swift

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

When people aren't expecting to be seen, they look their truest. — Graham Swift

Graham Swift Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Graham Swift

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. — Graham Swift

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. — Graham Swift

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. — Graham Swift

You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else is in charge, because there is a part of the system above you which you don't know, you don't question it, you even distrust your own doubts. — Graham Swift

I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page. — Graham Swift

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

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings? — Graham Swift

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

What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all? — Graham Swift

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. — Graham Swift

And I didn't know I loved her till I'd dreamt of her. I didn't know it was the real thing until an illusion had signalled it. — Graham Swift

Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know. — Graham Swift

Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved. 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. — Graham Swift

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. — Graham Swift

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

Life Lessons by Graham Swift

1. Graham Swift teaches us to appreciate the small things in life, to be mindful of our experiences and to savor the moments that make up our lives.
2. His works also emphasize the importance of relationships, showing us how they can shape our lives and the importance of cherishing them.
3. Finally, Swift encourages us to remain open-minded and to accept the unpredictability of life, embracing the surprises and changes that come our way.