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" I was disinclined to have the status of a writer. "
Michel Faber
Writer
Status
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" When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.' "
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" For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums. "
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" At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Modern politicians like Cameron dream of exerting paternal influence without being seen as paternalistic, of fostering moral behaviour without being considered moralistic. "
Michel Faber
Dream
Influence
Moral
" Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist. "
Michel Faber
Head
Exist
Art
" 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. "
Michel Faber
History
May
People
" I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people. "
Michel Faber
People
I Am
Does
" I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever. "
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Book
Feeling
Race
" I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write. "
Michel Faber
Earth
Things
Think
" Of course it's fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who've never met me, who don't know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he's just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was. "
Michel Faber
Know
Me
Rest
" I never, ever want to be in a position where people are sitting round a table, saying, 'We've got this book. I don't really get it, but we paid for it, so we've got to sell it.' I'm not Tony Parsons; that's not right for me. "
Michel Faber
Me
Saying
Sitting
" On an average day, I spend 12 hours listening to music. Very little writing. "
Michel Faber
Writing
Music
Average
" 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
Me
Love
" I don't remember my childhood very well for one reason or another, possibly childhood trauma or possibly just a very bad memory. My early life has sort of been erased from my memory banks. "
Michel Faber
Memory
Remember
Life
" 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. "
Michel Faber
Care
Love
Earth
" So many books that have Christian characters but are written by atheists mercilessly pillory and mock and question the motives of people with faith. I'm past all that. "
Michel Faber
Christian
Faith
Past
" Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable. "
Michel Faber
Good
Weird
Need
" 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. "
Michel Faber
Trees
Sound
World
" Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it. "
Michel Faber
Will
World
Fate
" I'm a loner and always have been. "
Michel Faber
Always
Been
Loner
" 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. "
Michel Faber
See
You
Think
" 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. "
Michel Faber
Ashamed
Help
Improve
" I'm still tremendously proud of 'Crimson Petal.' I'm still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them. "
Michel Faber
Involved
Proud
Still
" 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. "
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Life
Way
Time
" 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. "
Michel Faber
Flying
Think
Together
" I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them. "
Michel Faber
Who
Respectful
Out
" 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. "
Michel Faber
I Am
Things
Success