Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells. "

Michel Faber

Writing

Think

Care

Related Quotes:

" On an average day, I spend 12 hours listening to music. Very little writing. "

" One of the things my success as an author has forced me to face is how dysfunctional... Maybe that's a strong word, but how obsessive I am. "

" My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I'm in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to. "

" I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people. "

" I'm still tremendously proud of 'Crimson Petal.' I'm still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them. "

" I'm a loner and always have been. "

" I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf. "

" If someone's a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin. "

Michel Faber

Kind

You

" I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them. "

" Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist. "

" I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly. "

" I'm constantly listening to music and thinking about it and compiling my own cassettes and CDs in obsessively specific order. I have quite lunatic agendas for what I want to achieve. They won't make sense to anyone other than me, but it is what I've spent most of my life doing. "

Michel Faber

Life

Listening

" I joined an Internet community of Victorian scholars, which meant that if I posted a question about 1875's lavender harvest, more than a thousand experts would ponder it. "

" I was disinclined to have the status of a writer. "

Michel Faber

Writer

Status

" When answering questions over the years about film and TV adaptations of my books, I have always maintained that no movie or TV series could ever change or damage my work. "

" Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it. "

" In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all. "

Michel Faber

Exploring

Think

" Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required. "

" One of the things that struck me about the 1870s, which we still haven't nearly addressed, is what to do about the male-female divide. One of the forbidden topics is when men own up to the omnivorousness of their sexual interest and how to square that with being in love with an individual woman. "

Michel Faber

Woman

Love

" I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us - we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms - we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we're gone. "

" The privileged Victorians who did most to improve the lives of the poor were not ashamed of their pious intent: they were superiors seeking to help inferiors. "

" When the person you love has cancer, they are, in a sense, living on Planet Cancer. They are in a place where you are not. And you can't follow them. "

" My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me. "

" Most books are surplus to the world's requirements, and I am going to sound very conceited here, but I am trying to write books that aren't just using up trees. "

" I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We're not going to get rid of that; it's just too scary to be that molecule flying around briefly in a vacuum. "

" All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve. "

" For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums. "

" I strive to use references that may still make some kind of sense once our age has passed into history. That robs my writing of a certain connectedness to my time, but potentially might allow it to make sense to people who are not in this time. "

" In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens. "

" I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write. "