Sebastian Faulks Quotes

If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.

I don’t do interviews at home any more because my wife doesn’t like having her taste in interiors put through the mill. And I get annoyed when journalists make snide remarks about the annoyingly pretentious shops in the neighbourhood – because I hate them just as much.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What I like in novels that I read and enjoy is interplay of theme: the mystery of how we seem to be so separate as human beings.

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.

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?

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.

I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.

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.

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.

If you have only one life, you can’t altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

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

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.

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.’

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?