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" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt the English language, and I fell in love with it. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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

Rest

" I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship. "

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

" By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag. "

Michel Faber

Time

Recycling

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" '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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Before I was published, I thought men read car manuals or books about football. But once I started having really serious conversations with male lovers of literature, I let go of that prejudice. "

Michel Faber

Men

Car

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "