"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."
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Quote collection
Graham Swift quotes (page 2 of 3)
46 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"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?"
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"When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading."
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"My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London."
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"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?"
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"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."
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"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."
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"I don't reread my books."
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"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."
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"If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong."
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"Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow."
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"My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort."
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"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"
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"How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting."
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"Pillow talk. It's how you know, it's how you tell, that something different, something special is happening: that this might even be the most important night of your life. Some day -some night- I hope you both may know it, with whoever it may be: the wish, stealing up on you, not to just merge bodies, but all you have, all your years, all your memories up to that point. And why should you wish to do that, if you haven't already guessed that your future too, will be shared?"
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