Michel Faber Quotes

#1. 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.

Michel Faber

#2. He ought to have conceded that she was a flower not destined to open, a hothouse creation, no less beautiful, no less woth having, He should have admired her, praised her and, at the close of day, let her be.

Michel Faber

#3. It was a husk, no longer truly their mother - more like their mother's most treasured possession, which had been given to them as a parting gift.

Michel Faber

#4. Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

#6. 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.

Michel Faber

#7. Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already

Michel Faber

#8. Peter was struck by the scar's essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.

Michel Faber

#9. Not for the first time, Peter thought about how much of our lives we spend sequestered inside small patches of electric brightness, blind to everything beyond the reach of those fragile bulbs.

Michel Faber

#10. [ ... ] how can one sleep while dancing at the edge of waves?

Michel Faber

#11. Few know what year it is, or even that eighteen and a half centuries are supposed to have passed since a Jewish troublemaker was hauled away to the gallows for disturbing the peace

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

#13. 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

#14. '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

#15. Shared suffering, she'd found, was no guarantee of intimacy.

Michel Faber

#16. Because I must do something while I still can. Each soul is still incalculably precious.

Michel Faber

#17. ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.

Michel Faber

#18. A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.

Michel Faber

#19. Protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory.

Michel Faber

#20. 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

#21. There is so little in the New Testament about sexual love, and most of it consists of Paul heaving a deep sigh and tolerating it like a weakness.

Michel Faber

#22. She sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board.

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

#24. Men! Armchair heroes the lot of them, while women were sent out to do the dirty work.

Michel Faber

#25. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the

Michel Faber

#26. 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

#27. Was it always the desirable ones that sat in silence, and the misshapen rejects that prattled away unprompted?

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

#29. Why was even the shallowest human conversation so fraught with pitfalls and tricky calibrations? Why couldn't people just keep silent until they had something essential to say, like the Oasans?

Michel Faber

#30. The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

Michel Faber

#31. What do his ambitions matter, if those are her collar-bones?

Michel Faber

#32. I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.

Michel Faber

#33. People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above.

Michel Faber

#34. You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last judgement, 100% less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?

Michel Faber

#35. Vess Incorporated had simply dug them out of one hole and buried them in another

Michel Faber

#36. 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

#37. Well, here we are.
Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.

Michel Faber

#38. Can't you see that? Everybody's sentimental, everybody.

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

#40. 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.

Michel Faber

#41. Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude.

Michel Faber

#42. She and they were all the same under the skin, weren't they?

Michel Faber

#43. 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

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

Michel Faber

#45. Coincidences like that served as a reminder that, variations in pigment aside, humans were all part of the same species.

Michel Faber

#46. 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

#47. It was such an infantile prayer, the sort of prayer a five-year-old might pray. But maybe those were the best kind.

Michel Faber

#48. It's not a colony," another of the USIC interviewers said, with an edge to her voice. "It's a community. We do not use the word colony.

Michel Faber

#49. 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

#50. Was a female. Isserley wasn't interested in females, at least not in that way. Let them get picked up by someone else. If the hitcher was male, she usually went back for another look, unless he was an obvious weakling. Assuming he'd made a reasonable impression on her,

Michel Faber

#51. Anyway, when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job.

Michel Faber

#52. 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

#53. 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.

Michel Faber

#54. Their wealth makes them like a different creature, an exotic thing that doesn't have to function like a human.

Michel Faber

#55. There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT.

Michel Faber

#56. 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

#57. History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.

Michel Faber

#58. I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.

Michel Faber

#59. William pouts irritably. Socialism is not the same thing as letting one's servants muddle towards anarchy. But never mind, never mind: on a day like today, it's not worth worrying over. Soon the servant question, at least in William Rackham's household, will be resolved beyond any ambiguity.

Michel Faber

#60. 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.

Michel Faber

#61. Anyway," Peter continued. "I got the most amazing welcome. These people are desperate to learn about God!"
"Well, ain't that a lick on the dick," said BG.

Michel Faber

#62. We are all specialised forms of survivor. We lack what we fundamentally need and forge ahead regardless, hurriedly hiding our wounds, disguising our ineptitude, bluffing our way through our weaknesses.

Michel Faber

#63. Wrinkles of the future, cicatrices of the past, all the million marks recording a private life that no outsider could ever understand.

Michel Faber

#64. Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.

Michel Faber

#65. 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

#66. Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.

Michel Faber

#67. Needs could not bully her.

Michel Faber

#68. Reassurance is such a sad, mad thing. Deep inside, everyone knows the truth.

Michel Faber

#69. 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.

Michel Faber

#70. Grainger looked exasperated. "Why don't you just come straight out and use the word aliens?
"Because we're the aliens here.

Michel Faber

#71. This is a street where the weaker souls crawl into bed as soon as the sun sets and lie awake listening to the rats.

Michel Faber

#72. Without you at my side, I feel as though my eyes are just a camera, like a closed-circuit camera without film in it, registering what's out there, second by second, letting it all vanish instantly to be replaced by more images, none of them properly appreciated.

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

#74. In every Christian's life there comes a time when he or she needs to know the precise circumstances under which God is willing to heal the sick.

Michel Faber

#75. And you know what people immediately start looking for, five minutes after they arrive someplace new? You know what's on their minds? I'll tell you: How are they gonna get laid, and where are they gonna find some mind-altering substances.

Michel Faber

#76. 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

#77. 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

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

Michel Faber

#79. You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.

Michel Faber

#80. 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.

Michel Faber

#81. She holds her head as high as if she were beautiful, and holds her body as if she were strong.

Michel Faber

#82. Peter ... " She let her head fall back against the seat and sighed. "Let's not go there."
"That's what people always say about places where they already are.

Michel Faber

#83. Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.

Michel Faber

#84. Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them.

Michel Faber

#85. He didn't want to be like some old-fashioned imperialist missionary, poncing about like Moses in a safari suit, capitalizing on a misconception that he was from the same tribe as Jesus and that God was an Englishman.

Michel Faber

#86. The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.

Michel Faber

#87. If she were its leader. Not that she ever would be: she was born to be a dissenter within a larger certainty, she knows that.

Michel Faber

#88. The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her.

Michel Faber

#89. I wouldn't use the word 'man'. The Hebrew is ha-adam, which I would argue encompasses both sexes.

Michel Faber

#90. I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss.

Michel Faber

#91. Most true things are kind of corny, don't you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.

Michel Faber

#92. Why, the top-notch gentleman visits his hatter every few days just to have his hat ironed!

Michel Faber

#93. Forgive me, Lord, for the smallness and selfishness of my mind. Amen.

Michel Faber

#94. 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.

Michel Faber

#95. The crowds that queued for snacks and knick-knacks, the constant stream of passengers recorded by the closed-circuit TVs, were wondrous proof of the sheer variety of human specimens, except that they were presumed to be identically faithless inside, duty-free in every sense of that word.

Michel Faber

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. She couldn't quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure.

Michel Faber

#99. 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.

Michel Faber

#100. It was already tomorrow. She should have known from the beginning that it would end like this.

Michel Faber