Graham Swift Quotes - Page 2

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?

I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.

People die when curiosity goes.

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

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I don't reread my books.

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.

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.

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.

My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.

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.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

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.

There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress I the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.