Quotes from Sebastian Faulks

Maintaining his solitude... 'I'd rather be abandoned than engulfed

One thing I had learned from medicine, however, was that denial was often a good strategy; it could buy time for wounds to heal themselves.

Cheers,' she said as I left, 'and don't forget you're seeing Matt and I on Monday.' I thought for a moment she'd said 'matineye', an East End pronunciation of 'matinee'. Was I meant to review it? Then I remembered Matt was the production editor. 'Me won't forget,' me muttered as me went downstairs.

Yet on the dusky veranda she had seemed like a force of nature that had somehow sought out the landscape of his longing and moulded itself to each contour.

In Frank I have found something beyond me, beyond my understanding, this is where some incredible core of me is destined to be even if not in this life.

Which of us can deny that at some level we are afflicted by a sense that our human lives are incomplete and that there lies, just beyond the reach of our perceptions, a paradise that once was ours?

Psychosis, ladies and gentlemen, is the price we pay for being what we are. And how unfair, how bitterly unfair it is that the price is not shared around but paid by one man in a hundred for the other ninety-nine.

A time before Flanders and Auschwitz had shown that, given the means of killing and the opportunity to use them, the species, far from being a pinnacle in creation, was actually lower on the scale than all others in its genus or family.

Gray looked at him. "If I die, Wraysford, and you are still alive, I want you to take charge of the company." "Me? Why not Harrington?" "Because you are a mad, cold-hearted devil and that is what we are going to need.

One last note on this illness. I said that it was terrible, yet that in some ways very little seemed to be wrong. Imagine a ship leaving West Africa for the New World. If the compass was set only one degree out – just one tiny degree out of three hundred and sixty – it could end up not in New York but in Mexico. That is what I mean by a tiny flaw and a catastrophic result.

wisps. His voice rose higher in his excitement. 'And don't look so sceptical.

I wanted to have a make-believe world because I couldn't bear to live in the real one.

I wanted another drink; I wanted another bottle; I wanted to drain the river Lethe till I was ready to be born again.

There is only one life; it is therefore perfect.

What had gone completely was the memory of what made her human, her ways and her thoughts. The withholding of these details was like a torment. When he tried to bring her back to mind, he could not hear the voice, he could not imagine one aspect of her, the way she looked or talked, the expressions of her face, her walk, her gestures. It was as though she were dead and he bore the responsibility for killing her.

the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In

People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose you

It was more wonderful than making love with a negro boxer on Mr Singer's billiard table.

The 'busy' thing isn't a commitment, it's an evasion.

Her life had reached an age at which she should no longer be the last to die; there ought to be someone younger than her, a generation of her children who should now be enjoying that luxurious safety of knowing that grandparents and parents still lay like a barrier between them and their mortality.

I think perhaps the reincarnation is not of other men through me, but of myself at other times. I've been forced by circumstance into many separate lives.

Under the treaty of Sevres in 1920 Greece had been given Smyrna, and by 1922 the Greek army was trying to push its way up the Aegean coast. The Turks, however, had found a leader in Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Atatürk) with no regard for treaties and a committed hatred of the Greeks. He drove their army back into Smyrna, and then did what any Turkish leader would have done: massacred them.

Alcohol provokes stupidity; opium provokes wisdom.

I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be