Top 100 Michel Faber Quotes
#1. Because human beings suffer so much more than ducks."
"You might not think so if you were a duck.
Michel Faber
#2. Their wealth makes them like a different creature, an exotic thing that doesn't have to function like a human.
Michel Faber
#3. What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.
Michel Faber
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Anyway, when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job.
Michel Faber
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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.
Michel Faber
#14. There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT.
Michel Faber
#15. Coincidences like that served as a reminder that, variations in pigment aside, humans were all part of the same species.
Michel Faber
#16. In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.
Michel Faber
#17. In the end, though, vodsels couldn't do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn't siuwil, the couldn't mesnishtil,they had no concept of slan.
Michel Faber
#18. When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'
Michel Faber
#19. 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
#20. She and they were all the same under the skin, weren't they?
Michel Faber
#21. Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude.
Michel Faber
#22. God damn God and all His horrible filthy Creation.
Michel Faber
#23. For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.
Michel Faber
#24. 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.
Michel Faber
#25. I am a fallen woman, but I assure you: I did not fall. I was pushed.
Michel Faber
#26. 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
#27. God preserve us from fuddle-headed young men who want money for building cloud-castles!
Michel Faber
#28. reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude. Of
Michel Faber
#29. 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
#30. Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.
Michel Faber
#31. Grainger looked exasperated. "Why don't you just come straight out and use the word aliens?
"Because we're the aliens here.
Michel Faber
#32. The holy book he'd spent so much of his life preaching from had one cruel flaw: it was not very good at offering encouragement or hope to those who weren't religious.
Michel Faber
#33. 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
#34. Reassurance is such a sad, mad thing. Deep inside, everyone knows the truth.
Michel Faber
#36. Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.
Michel Faber
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Michel Faber
#39. 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
#40. Wrinkles of the future, cicatrices of the past, all the million marks recording a private life that no outsider could ever understand.
Michel Faber
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. A simple fuck is one thing, but let a man sleep with you just once and he thinks he can bring his dog and his pigeons.
Michel Faber
#45. 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.
Michel Faber
#46. 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
#47. They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.
Michel Faber
#48. I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.
Michel Faber
#49. History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.
Michel Faber
#50. 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
#51. I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write.
Michel Faber
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory.
Michel Faber
#55. 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
#56. If someone's a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin.
Michel Faber
#57. 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
#58. Because I must do something while I still can. Each soul is still incalculably precious.
Michel Faber
#59. Shared suffering, she'd found, was no guarantee of intimacy.
Michel Faber
#60. '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
#61. 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
#62. Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.
Michel Faber
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. [ ... ] how can one sleep while dancing at the edge of waves?
Michel Faber
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.
Michel Faber
#71. Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas
Michel Faber
#72. 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
#73. Could indicate the cocky self-awareness of a male in prime condition.
Michel Faber
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. When answering questions over the years about film and TV adaptations of my books, I have always maintained that no movie or TV series could ever change or damage my work.
Michel Faber
#77. I'm still tremendously proud of 'Crimson Petal.' I'm still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them.
Michel Faber
#78. Can't you see that? Everybody's sentimental, everybody.
Michel Faber
#79. 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
#80. 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
#82. Vess Incorporated had simply dug them out of one hole and buried them in another
Michel Faber
#83. 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
#84. Isn't Heaven reward enough, without needing to see the damned punished?
Michel Faber
#85. 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
#86. I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.
Michel Faber
#87. What do his ambitions matter, if those are her collar-bones?
Michel Faber
#88. 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
#89. The word troubled her, though. 'Indispensable.' It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.
Michel Faber
#90. MERCY. It was a word she'd rarely encountered
Michel Faber
#91. 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
#92. Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events
Michel Faber
#93. I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.
Michel Faber
#94. Was it always the desirable ones that sat in silence, and the misshapen rejects that prattled away unprompted?
Michel Faber
#95. 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
#96. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the
Michel Faber
#97. She talks about being a Christian as if it's a gym membership you can sign up for.
Michel Faber
#98. Men! Armchair heroes the lot of them, while women were sent out to do the dirty work.
Michel Faber
#99. I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them.
Michel Faber
#100. 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
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