Graham Joyce
Graham Joyce
Graham Joycewas a British writer of speculative fiction and the recipient of numerous awards, including the O Henry Award, for both his novels and short stories. He grew up in a small mining village just outside Coventry to a working-class family. After receiving a B.Ed. from Bishop Lonsdale College in 1977 and a M.A. from the University of Leicester in 1980. Joyce worked as a youth officer for the National Association of Youth Clubs until 1988. He subsequently quit his...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth22 October 1954
The mist hung in the air like a prancing unicorn.
The bluebells made such a pool that the earth had become like water, and all the trees and bushes seemed to have grown out of the water. And the sky above seemed to have fallen down on to the earth floor; and I didn’t know if the sky was the earth or the earth was water. I had been turned upside down. I had to hold the rock with my fingernails to stop me falling into the sky of the earth or the water of the sky. But I couldn’t hold on.
The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out.
The blood in my veins is frozen but it sings of love.
But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don't take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes.
What I mean is this: you meet someone, you think about them. You're already changing because of the way you think about them. You meet them again, you think about them some more, you're changing again. And on it goes. You are changing right now. Before my eyes.
Because two people in love don't make a hive mind. Neither should they want to be a hive mind, to think the same, to know the same. It's about being separate and still loving each other, being distinct from each other. One is the violin string one is the bow.
Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made.
Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.
Repression in the human psyche is tightly bundled. When it has been pulled out of the sprung package so often it is perhaps difficult to push it back in the box.
It's just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He's the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called 'chads,' a notion we've never entirely grasped.
I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.
Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.
I've been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs.