Top 50 Graham Swift Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Literature is the voice of the human heart.”

— Graham Swift

2. “How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it’s so slow and sweet and everlasting.”

— Graham Swift

3. “What is a history teacher? He’s someone who teaches mistakes.”

— Graham Swift

4. “Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.”

— Graham Swift

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath, a holocaust, an Armageddon? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing?”

— Graham Swift

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

— Graham Swift

13. “People die when curiosity goes.”

— Graham Swift

14. “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

15. “What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.”

— Graham Swift

16. “Today’s news, which may be yesterday’s anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.”

— Graham Swift

17. “And so long as we have this itch for explanations, must we not always carry round with us this cumbersome but precious bag of clues called History? Another definition: Man, the animal which demands an explanation, the animal which asks Why.”

— Graham Swift

18. “We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of combustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn’t it?”

— Graham Swift

19. “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

20. “It makes you feel sort of cheap and titchy. Like it’s looking down at you, saying, I’m Canterbury Cathedral, who the hell are you?”

— Graham Swift

21. “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

22. “My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.”

— Graham Swift

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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?”

— Graham Swift

27. “I respond to the sound of London being spoken – to the sound of London.”

— Graham Swift

28. “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.”

— Graham Swift

29. “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.”

— Graham Swift

30. “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

31. “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

32. “When I am writing, I’m very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.”

— Graham Swift

33. “My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer’s upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.”

— Graham Swift

34. “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

35. “People read books, didn’t they, to get away from themselves, to escape the troubles of their lives?”

— Graham Swift

36. “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

37. “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.”

— Graham Swift

38. “When something’s one thing, it’s not another.”

— Graham Swift

39. “When people aren’t expecting to be seen, they look their truest.”

— Graham Swift

40. “There are no compasses for journeying in time.”

— Graham Swift

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

— Graham Swift

42. “Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.”

— Graham Swift

43. “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.’”

— Graham Swift

44. “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

45. “And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.”

— Graham Swift

46. “I don’t reread my books.”

— Graham Swift

47. “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

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

— Graham Swift

49. “It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life – oh so many more than we think – can never be explained at all.”

— Graham Swift

50. “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