Graham Swift

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

“Once upon a time, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars, before the male servants disappeared and they made do, at Upleigh and at Beechwood, with just a cook and a maid, the Sheringhams had owned not just four horses in their own stable, but what might be called a 'real horse', a racehorse, a thoroughbred. Its name was Fandango. It was stabled near Newbury. It had never won a damn thing. But is was the family's indulgence, their hope for fame and glory on the racecourses of southern England. The deal was that Pa and Ma - otherwise known in his strange language as 'the shower' - owned the head and body and he and Dick and Freddy had a leg each.'What about the fourth leg?''Oh the fourth leg. That was always the question.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't reread my books.”

“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.”

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