Quotes from Sebastian Faulks

I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.

If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

I've found contemporary Britain difficult to write about because it seems to me to have lacked gravity or grandeur. This is some cultural problem which I don't really understand. It simply isn't the same in the United States.

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

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.

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.

Certainly, we all have within us the potential to live in a hugely different way. And how happy you can make yourself, I think, a lot depends on how much you beat yourself up about that; and how much you can, in some sort of providential way, console yourself and say, 'Well, it's all worked out for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.'

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.'

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.

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded

Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

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

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.

You put your time where your priority is.

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.