Michel Faber quotes

Let's not be coy: you were hoping that I would satisfy all the desires you're too shy to name, or at least show you a good time. Now you hesitate, still holding on to me, but tempted to let me go. (Michel Faber)

I've studied Ulysses in depth and still think it's a great and ground-breaking book, a brave and sincere trail-blazer - but also massively self-indulgent, baggy, and irritating. Joyce was a wonderful liberator, but his approach is dangerous for a writer to emulate, since he had a massive ego and was convinced that every word he wrote was sacred. Have you seen his annotated proofs? He scarcely ever deleted a word, just added screeds and screeds more stuff in the margins. He also believed that people should, and would, read novels with the same slow, studious pondering of every word and phrase that they bring to ancient scripture, which I think is a stupid thing for a storyteller to expect.

Michel Faber

Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them.

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

Most true things are kind of corny, don't you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

The main characters in this story, with whom you want to become intimate, are nowhere near here. They aren't expecting you; you mean nothing to them. If you think they're going to get out of their warm beds and travel miles to meet you, you are mistaken.

Michel Faber

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.

Michel Faber

What you lack is the right connections, and that is what I've brought you here to make: connections. (Michel Faber)

Trust is absolutely precious, and its betrayal horrifies me. I do want readers to trust me. And yet I don't want to offer them a safe, predictable ride.

Michel Faber

'The Crimson Petal and the White' is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on.

Michel Faber

The privileged Victorians who did most to improve the lives of the poor were not ashamed of their pious intent: they were superiors seeking to help inferiors.

Michel Faber

Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist.

Michel Faber

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

Michel Faber

'A Christmas Carol' is an extravagantly symbolic thing - as rich in symbols as Christmas pudding is rich in raisins.

Michel Faber

Most books are surplus to the world's requirements, and I am going to sound very conceited here, but I am trying to write books that aren't just using up trees.

Michel Faber