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" 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
Circumstances
Grow
Grow Up
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" 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
Join
Somewhere
Secret
" One of the things that probably drew me to writing was that it was something you could get on with by yourself. Publishing means going public. But the actual activity could scarcely be more invisible. And private. "
Graham Swift
Yourself
You
Writing
" 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
Time
You
Trust
" When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading. "
Graham Swift
I Am
Am
Ground
" 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. "
Graham Swift
Done
Plan
Think
" Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself. "
Graham Swift
Myself
Away
Get
" There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon dates and it's never enough. "
Graham Swift
Seeing
Most
Enough
" I tend to begin with what you might call the very small world of personal life. But I am certainly interested in how that small, intimate world connects or doesn't connect with a larger world. "
Graham Swift
Small
World
I Am
" 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
You
Saying
Man
" 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
View
Feel
Tomorrow
" 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
Speed
Summer
Name
" 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
Potential
Mentor
Family
" 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
Say
Way
Pride
" 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
Way
You
Sitting
" 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
Life
Never
You
" 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
Speed
Labor
Matter
" 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
Time
Think
Say
" I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it. "
Graham Swift
Find
Think
Like
" 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
Special
Find
Looks
" 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
See
Lose
Digital
" 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
Ahead
Work
Know
" I don't reread my books. "
Graham Swift
Books
" The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air. "
Graham Swift
Because
Air
Up
" 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
London
Place
Hate
" 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
Everything
Happy
Original
" I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London. "
Graham Swift
Sound
Being
London
" The idea of stopping is not unmeaningful to me. I think there might be a time when, in theory at least, you'd say, 'Well I've mostly done what I want to do.' But how could you ever prevent a few years down the line some germ of an idea getting at you and you've got to do it again? "
Graham Swift
Me
You
Done
" My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite. "
Graham Swift
Writer
Opposite
Absolutely
" My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort. "
Graham Swift
Memories
Children
Great
" 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
City
Weather
Moments