Sebastian Faulks Quotes & Sayings

#1. One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

#2. How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.

#3. And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.

Sebastian Faulks

#4. the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In

Sebastian Faulks

#5. We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

Sebastian Faulks

#6. He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.

Sebastian Faulks

#7. He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

Sebastian Faulks

#8. If you have only one life, you can't altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

Sebastian Faulks

#9. All my books are about one major idea and two or three subsidiary ones. I have thought a lot about music when constructing books, and I like the way in music that themes come back.

Sebastian Faulks

#10. A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

Sebastian Faulks

#11. I've found contemporary Britain difficult to write about because it seems to me to have lacked gravity or grandeur. This is some cultural problem which I don't really understand. It simply isn't the same in the United States.

Sebastian Faulks

#12. As far as 'Birdsong' is concerned, I think the television program made a very honorable attempt at it, but the truth of the matter is that adaptations of long, ambitious books very seldom transfer well to the screen, and why would they?

Sebastian Faulks

#13. He didn't ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant.

Sebastian Faulks

#14. It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

Sebastian Faulks

#15. She was so beautiful I had to move away.

Sebastian Faulks

#16. There is nothing more sir, than to love and be loved.

Sebastian Faulks

#17. Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

Sebastian Faulks

#18. It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

Sebastian Faulks

#19. Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.

Sebastian Faulks

#20. They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.

Sebastian Faulks

#21. Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.

Sebastian Faulks

#22. I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.

Sebastian Faulks

#23. We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.

Sebastian Faulks

#24. The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

Sebastian Faulks

#25. Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror.

Sebastian Faulks

#26. I saw an old woman dressed in seatcovers, sewn into a dress, a man in a jacket made from a flag. It gave them an air of desperate grandeur, like guests at an asylum ball.

Sebastian Faulks

#27. His own men, those who would attack in the morning, knelt on the earth, faces hidden behind one hand, in an agonizing tunnel of their own, a darkness where there was no time but where they tried to look on death.

Sebastian Faulks

#28. There is only one life; it is therefore perfect.

Sebastian Faulks

#29. Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

Sebastian Faulks

#30. I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

Sebastian Faulks

#31. In the 1970s, British food was beginning to get good, whereas in France it was just starting its long, sad decline. My most memorable meals, however, have been in Italy.

Sebastian Faulks

#32. And in that history you're trying to connect to something that once was yours - to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew.

Sebastian Faulks

#33. We have lived too closely, been through too much. I will not leave you. I cannot, any more than I can leave myself.

Sebastian Faulks

#34. The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

Sebastian Faulks

#35. It's possible there are no two books in publishing history more dissimilar than 'Human Traces' and 'Devil May Care.' And that was really the attraction of it.

Sebastian Faulks

#36. How do you 'clear' your thoughts? You have only other thoughts with which to do the job; 'thoughts', therefore, are both blockage and broom. I suppose what we mean is that we should stop reasoning and try to 'feel' - which presumes that what we 'feel' is more valuable than anything we think ...

Sebastian Faulks

#37. I don't know how you can understand other people or yourself if you haven't read a lot of books. I just don't think you're equipped to deal with the demands and decisions of life, particularly in your dealings with other people.

Sebastian Faulks

#38. The more I heard, the less I knew.

Sebastian Faulks

#39. I believe your stomach tells you what it wants, and I don't think mine asks for anything that unhealthy. I'm a trained health machine.

Sebastian Faulks

#40. I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time.

Sebastian Faulks

#41. To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year?' That would be ridiculous.

Sebastian Faulks

#42. There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.

Sebastian Faulks

#43. If only I could have my time again.

Sebastian Faulks

#44. Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

Sebastian Faulks

#45. The nicest characters in 'A Week in December' are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

Sebastian Faulks

#46. But you must live your own life eventually. You have one chance only.

Sebastian Faulks

#47. It is fair to say the New Testament is the most ethically sophisticated of the great scriptures; the proper comparison for the Qur'an is with the Old Testament - against which it holds its own.

Sebastian Faulks

#48. Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

Sebastian Faulks

#49. Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

Sebastian Faulks

#50. But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.

Sebastian Faulks

#51. All that once I'd known, I had forgotten.

Sebastian Faulks

#52. Alcohol provokes stupidity; opium provokes wisdom.

Sebastian Faulks

#53. The religion I know most about, which is the Christian one, would simply say that it's not really for one man or woman to know fully and to understand the nature of our brief human existence.

Sebastian Faulks

#54. To wake up and feel enlivened; to be in a hurry to get out of bed and into the day. To have friends you want to speak to, compare experiences with and be on the phone to ... Well, to be honest, I'm still some way from that.

Sebastian Faulks

#55. I'm not going to miss all this, am I?

Sebastian Faulks

#56. I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

Sebastian Faulks

#57. Why would a novel - which is all about the inward processes of people's developing feelings and developing relationships - why would you be able to portray that in pictures with as few words as possible, which is what the best films are?

Sebastian Faulks

#58. My parents' generation didn't have any understanding of psychology or emotion or individual temperament. In fact, they were slightly embarrassed by all those words.

Sebastian Faulks

#59. I think my generation has had an unbelievably easy time profiting from the world that was made for us by our parents and grandparents. We are essentially a rather frivolous generation. The Blair government was my generation's shot at power. It had some good things, but it had some flaws.

Sebastian Faulks

#60. My ideal relationship with the reader is that at certain points they will have said, 'I'm finding this quite tough, but I'm going to hang in there,' then at the end they will say, 'Oh God, I'm glad I hung on, it was so worth it.'

Sebastian Faulks

#61. That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

Sebastian Faulks

#62. If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind.

Sebastian Faulks

#63. I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

Sebastian Faulks

#64. I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

Sebastian Faulks

#65. The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

Sebastian Faulks

#66. I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it.

Sebastian Faulks

#67. Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do.

Sebastian Faulks

#68. Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

Sebastian Faulks

#69. Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

Sebastian Faulks

#70. Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.

Sebastian Faulks

#71. All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.

Sebastian Faulks

#72. If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.

Sebastian Faulks

#73. The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

Sebastian Faulks

#74. I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.

Sebastian Faulks

#75. The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

Sebastian Faulks

#76. If you're mad enough to have killed a dozen people you're mad enough to be a fraction impatient. Surely?

Sebastian Faulks

#77. He really was a prize ass.

Sebastian Faulks

#78. He wanted also to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world's creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it. His body shook with the passion of the love that had found him, from which he had been exiled in the blood and the flesh of long killing.

Sebastian Faulks

#79. I believe that love between people is the greatest life-giving force in the world. It's intensely frustrating and inevitably makes a fool of you, but you can't stop going back to it, and it's pretty much the defining experience of a human being.

Sebastian Faulks

#80. What a pair of frauds.

Sebastian Faulks

#81. One of the young officers was playing a piano in the corner, although not all the men were singing the same song.

Sebastian Faulks

#82. Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.

Sebastian Faulks

#83. There you are, sir. There's nothing more than to love and be loved.

Sebastian Faulks

#84. I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people - to take them through the argument by dramatizing the circumstances in which these issues are being discussed.

Sebastian Faulks

#85. It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.

Sebastian Faulks

#86. There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.

Sebastian Faulks

#87. I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.

Sebastian Faulks

#88. You put your time where your priority is.

Sebastian Faulks

#89. I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be

Sebastian Faulks

#90. The Turks moved in the next day and killed everyone in sight, including the staff of the nursing home.

Sebastian Faulks

#91. Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.

Sebastian Faulks

#92. Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried, and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self.

Sebastian Faulks

#93. I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.

Sebastian Faulks