Words matter. These are the best Sebastian Faulks Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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 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.
A romantic is someone who believes that something is valuable even if it doesn’t last. And a non-romantic is someone who says that if something doesn’t endure, or can’t be logically proved and pinned down, it’s worthless.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.
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.’
If you have only one life, you can’t altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
