Michel Faber Quotes

a child's disquiet is as potent as a damp fart.

Only the other day, Robbie had gone to a terrible disco in Alness, hoping it would transform his life in some way.

What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.

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

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.

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.

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.

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

Peter's hands had ceased trembling. He had been granted perspective. This was not Gethsemane: he wasn't headed for Golgotha, he was embarking on a great adventure. He'd been chosen out of thousands, to pursue the most important missionary calling since the Apostles had ventured forth to conquer Rome with the power of love, and he was going to do his best.

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.

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

Some people go through the heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? And then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9:35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. Forever.

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.

God preserve us from fuddle-headed young men who want money for building cloud-castles!

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.

I'm a loner and always have been.

Away, and she could carry a bag on each arm, providing

Never too late for vocabulary building, he said.

He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing toward the New Land ... who knows what was on his mind? The last words spoken to him by an old friend, perhaps, a person not even remembered in history books ...

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

We're moving towards such a strange time.A time when all our moral choices will be complicated and compromised by our love of progress

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.

To be brutally honest, all these men were falling apart, hair by hair and tooth by tooth, like over-used pieces of equipment, like tools bought cheap for a job that would outlast them. While

Sugar leans her chin against the knuckles of the hand that holds the pen. Glistening on the page between her silk-shrouded elbows lies an unfinished sentence. The heroine of her novel has just slashed the throat of a man. The problem is how, precisely, the blood will flow. Flow is too gentle a word; spill implies carelessness; spurt is out of the question because she has used the word already, in another context, a few lines earlier. Pour out implies that the man has some control over the matter, which he most emphatically doesn't; leak is too feeble for the savagery of the injury she has inflicted upon him. Sugar closes her eyes and watches, in the lurid theatre of her mind, the blood issue from the slit neck. When Mrs Castaway's warning bell sounds, she jerks in surprise.
Hastily, she scrutinises her bedroom. Everything is neat and tidy. All her papers are hidden away, except for this single sheet on her writing-desk.
Spew, she writes, having finally been given, by tardy Providence, the needful word.

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

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

Locating a past event in measured time was something they could do with great effort, as a special favor, but Peter could tell they didn't see the point. Why should it matter exactly how many days, weeks, months or years ago a relative had died? A person was either living amongst them or in the ground.

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.

UFCNo such thing as childhood memories, he says. We're just playing games with our neurons every day, tossing them around the hippocampus, constructing little fairy tales featuring characters named after people we used to live with. 'Your dad is just a flurry of molecular activity in your frontal lobe' he'll tell you...

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.

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.

God, Agnes has decided, is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach. So, They tolerate each other, and take care of the world as best They can. Moving

I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.

Needs could not bully her.

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

The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective.

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.

Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow's evaporation, When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever.

A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.

The highway looked different to him now, as they drove on. In theory it was the same stretch of tarmac, bounded by the same traffic paraphernalia and flimsy metal fences, but it had been transformed by their own intent. It was no longer a straight line to an airport, it was a mysterious hinterland of shadowy detours and hidey-holes. Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude. Of course, everybody on earth had the power to reshape reality. It was one of the things Peter and Beatrice talked about a lot. The challenge of getting people to grasp that life was only as grim and confining as you perceived it to be. The challenge of getting people to see that the immutable facts of existence were not so immutable after all. The challenge of finding a simpler word for immutable than immutable.

Well, I did my best,' said Amlis, in a self-deprecating purr. 'But I can tell when a challenge is hopeless. Anyway, it's not your minds I need to change.' And he glanced round at the contents of the ship's hull, acknowledging the scale of the slaughter and its commercial purpose.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yes, seven years old she was, when she finally plucked up the courage to ask her mother what Christmas was all about, and Mrs Castaway replied (once only, after which the subject was forever forbidden): 'It's the day Jesus Christ died for our sins. Evidently unsuccessfully, since we're still paying for them.

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

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.

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.

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.

How's things, man?" The black man extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow.
"Very good," said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn't have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.

I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.

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

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

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

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.

These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.

To her, all familiar responses smell of entrapment. Sharing an old joke, singing an old song - these are admissions of defeat, of being satisfied with one's lot. In the sky, the Fates are watching, and when they hear such things, they murmur amongst themselves: Ah yes, that one is quite content as she is; changing her lot would only confuse her.

Sugar understood the permanence of being Sugar or Lotty or Lucy or whoever you might be, trapped on a square of card to be shown at will to strangers. Whatever violations she routinely submits to in the privacy of bedroom, they vanish the moment they're over, half-forgotten with the drying of sweat. But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Hope is a fragile thing, Peter continued, as fragile as a flower. Its fragility makes it easy to sneer at, by people who see life as a dark and difficult ordeal, people who get angry when something they can't believe in themselves gives comfort to others. They prefer to crush the flower underfoot, as if to say: See how weak this thing is, see how easily it can be destroyed. But, in truth, hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires fall, civilizations vanish into dust, but hope always comes back, pushing up through the ashes, growing from seeds that are invisible and invincible.

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

Oh how she wondered, what she looked like to him, in his alien innocence.

Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.

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

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

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.

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

You know,' Amlis went on, 'Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.' His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. 'It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn't believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As if nature was actually trying to nurture me.

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.

MERCY. It was a word she'd rarely encountered

Because human beings suffer so much more than ducks."
"You might not think so if you were a duck.

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.

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,

Falling in love: how does it work? Over the years we gather the odd clue, but nothing adds up. We'd like to think we have a picture of our future partner projected in our mind, all their qualities recorded as if on film, and we just search the planet for that person until we find them, sitting in Casablanca waiting to be recognised. But in reality our love lives are blown around by career and coincidence, not to mention lack of nerve on given occasions, and we never have respectable reasons for anything until we have to make them up afterwards for the benefit of our curious friends.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.

A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving of the Queen or the provision of daily bread, is still the prime suspect when anything goes wrong.

I am a fallen woman, but I assure you: I did not fall. I was pushed.

Hey, non dispera! There is a way out. Come to beautiful Oasis. No crime, no madness, no bad stuff of any kind, a brand new home, home on the range, no or antelope but hey, accentuate the positive, there never is a discouraging word, nobody rapes you or tries to reminisce about Paris in the springtime, no sense sniffing that old vomit, right? Cut the strings, blank the slate, let go of Auschwitz and the Alamo and the ... the fucking Egyptians for God's sake, who needs it, who cares, focus on tomorrow. Onward and upward. Come to beautiful Oasis.

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.

She talks about being a Christian as if it's a gym membership you can sign up for.

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.

Could indicate the cocky self-awareness of a male in prime condition.

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

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.

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.

I just wish," she said, "that this magnificent, stupendous God of yours could give a fuck.

All along the street, keys rattle in key-holes as each shop's ornate metal clothing is stripped away ... It's as if, having unlocked the chastity of shutters and doors, they can't see the point in maintaining any shred of modesty.