Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Modern politicians like Cameron dream of exerting paternal influence without being seen as paternalistic, of fostering moral behaviour without being considered moralistic. "

Related Quotes:

" 'The Crimson Petal and the White' is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on. "

Michel Faber

Trust

Reading

Relationship

" 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. "

" The family I grew up in was very inflexible and harsh. It left me with the feeling that if you do let somebody down badly, then even if they tell you it's all right, it cannot be all right. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable. "

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

" The mere fact of my novel being filmed means very little to me. For a long while after 'The Crimson Petal's publication in 2002, it looked as though Hollywood was going to adapt it. "

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

" 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

Saying

Sitting

" 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. "

" I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger of repeating myself. "

" A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience. "

" 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. "

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

Michel Faber

Writer

Status

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

" History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "