Quotes from Graham Swift

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

Life goes on. It doesn't go on. Yes, yes, I know, all we want in the end, we living, breathing creatures (am I still one of them?) is life. All we want to believe in is the persistence and vitality of life. Faced with the choice between death and the merest hint of life, what scrap, what token wouldn't we cling to in order to keep that belief? A leaf? A single moist, green leaf? That will do, that will be enough.

How we forgive narrowness of mind, when it accompanies largeness of heart. Yet no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling.

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

What is a history teacher? He's someone who teaches mistakes.

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?

People read books, didn't they, to get away from themselves, to escape the troubles of their lives?

There are no compasses for journeying in time.

But I have not brought history with me this evening (history is a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife blade called Now). I have brought my fear.

This was the great truth of life, that fact and fiction were always merging, interchanging.

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.

What job do you want to do? And I see them all hanging up before me, like clothes on a rack, all the jobs, tinker, tailor, soldier, and you have to pick one and then you have to pretend for the rest of your life that that's what you are. So they aint no different really from accidents of birth. I didn't know that phrase then but I learnt it later. It's a good phrase...

Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

Hamlet's mother says to Hamlet, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" What is the difference between belief and make-belief? What makes us give to any one belief (since it is only a matter of shifting, tuning the mind) the peculiar weight of actuality? "For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Unfortunately writers take a very small part of the profit on their books, and I think in the e-book world there is a real danger they will take even less, unless they are vigilant and robust about protecting their own interests.