Quotes from Michel Faber

façades of the unknown city loomed up before him, harboring unimaginable wonders—his whole life had been leading up to this.

They were, of course, hopelessly lost.

For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.

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.

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.

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.

I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.

I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship.

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.

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.

All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm a loner and always have been.

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

Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.

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

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.

Shared suffering, she'd found, was no guarantee of intimacy.

History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.