Graham Swift Quotes

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.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.

Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.

What I react against in other people's work, as a filmgoer, is when I see something in a movie that I feel is supposed to make me feel emotional, but I don't believe the filmmaker shares that emotion. They just think the audience will. And I think you can feel that separation. So any time I find myself writing something that I don't really respond to, but I'm telling myself, 'Oh yes, but the audience is going to like this,' then I know I'm on the wrong track and I just throw it out.

There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.

I've always had a great love of music since childhood. It changes every day.. every time you write, it's a new experience. It's a self expression.

I've never written for anybody else. For me, it was a challenge. I write for me. I don't write for anybody else. And what was good about it was that I was writing for somebody I knew. I knew what my mother thinks and how she feels. So it was finding that creative spirit to write about my mother.

Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.

I write emotional algebra.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.

To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes-countrysides and figures, movements and gestures-how could he have a style, that is originality?

You can't write if you can't relate.

I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write.

I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.

If I write a paragraph and I don't get a certain lift from it, if I don't feel connected to it emotionally, then it's dead to me. When I'm reading other fiction writers, if I don't get any emotional investment from the writer, if it's just intellectual or clever - you know, most writing that passes as deep is just clever - I don't feel any connection.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

I'm inspired by whatever I see, feel, hear about, watch on the TV...anything. It can be something that I really need to get off my chest so I write or something a friend is going through which gets my thoughts going.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.