Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

- Graham Swift

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…

- Graham Swift

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

- Graham Swift

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of rea…

- Graham Swift

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,…

- Graham Swift

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

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

- Graham Swift

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

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…

- Graham Swift