Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.' "

" 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

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

Michel Faber

Writer

Status

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

" 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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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