Sebastian Faulks Quotes & Sayings

Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals." Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived ... Suppose, though, you're not sure that what you're doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It's easy, it pays quite well. But really it's a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing. — Sebastian Faulks

The thunder of false modesty was deafening. — Sebastian Faulks

I don't know how you can understand other people or yourself if you haven't read a lot of books. I just don't think you're equipped to deal with the demands and decisions of life, particularly in your dealings with other people. — Sebastian Faulks

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating. — Sebastian Faulks

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything. — Sebastian Faulks

I've met men I would trust in the mouth of hell. Byrne or Douglas. I would trust them to breathe for me, to pump my blood with their hearts."
"Did you love them best? Would they be the ones you'd choose?"
"To die with? No. The one time I've felt what you describe was with a woman."
"A lover, you mean?" said Jack. "Not your own flesh and blood?"
"I think she was my own flesh and blood. I truly believe she was. — Sebastian Faulks

With no blame there's no shame. A human society can't exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It's a central human attribute. In fact, it's the first human quality ever recorded.'
'Where?'
'Genesis, Chapter Three. The covering of nakedness. The acquisition of shame was the first consequence of consciousness, of the speciating moment. Take shame from me and you are calling me pre-human. — Sebastian Faulks

To wake up and feel enlivened; to be in a hurry to get out of bed and into the day. To have friends you want to speak to, compare experiences with and be on the phone to ... Well, to be honest, I'm still some way from that. — Sebastian Faulks

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight. — Sebastian Faulks

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive. — Sebastian Faulks

They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation. — Sebastian Faulks

She was so beautiful I had to move away. — Sebastian Faulks

I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it. — Sebastian Faulks

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . . — Sebastian Faulks

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.' — Sebastian Faulks

I don't know your life history, but I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves. That's why they read books about witches and wizards and God knows what. There is a human need for that which childhood normally exhausts. But if a child's world is broken up by too much reality, that need goes underground. — Sebastian Faulks

I think I have fallen in love and I believe the woman in question, though she has not said so, returns my feelings. How can I be sure when she has said nothing? Is this youthful vanity? I wish in some ways that it were. But I am so convinced that I barely need question myself. This conviction brings me no joy.
[ ... ]
I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive. — Sebastian Faulks

I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream."
"I think what's happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They've remodeled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they'll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people. — Sebastian Faulks

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? — Sebastian Faulks

I liked slicing through the beige brain when it had been fixed; the texture reminded me of cooked cauliflower. It was wonderful to hold this shrunken organ in your hands, the formaldehyde running down over your wrists, and picture the billion firing synapse that for many years had made the cauliflower believe that it was Fred. — Sebastian Faulks

And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

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

His own men, those who would attack in the morning, knelt on the earth, faces hidden behind one hand, in an agonizing tunnel of their own, a darkness where there was no time but where they tried to look on death. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either. — Sebastian Faulks

I wonder what it's like to be dead. — Sebastian Faulks

Bond doesn't have an inner life. There would be moments when I'd think, 'We need to gather our thoughts here and have a breather,' where in another novel you'd slow the pace, have some description and see what Bond feels about this. But Bond doesn't reflect. All you can do is move on to the next bomb or shark or car. — Sebastian Faulks

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

Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself. — Sebastian Faulks

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender. — Sebastian Faulks

The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament. — Sebastian Faulks

Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities. — Sebastian Faulks

All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond ... flesh, the moment of being alive ... then nothing. I had searched in superstition ... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so ... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me ... I saw that those simple things might be true ... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence. — Sebastian Faulks

But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It's like everything that happens to you. It doesn't feel real. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

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

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. — Sebastian Faulks

Grief is a peculiar emotion. — Sebastian Faulks

I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people - to take them through the argument by dramatizing the circumstances in which these issues are being discussed. — Sebastian Faulks

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else's. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else's, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate. — Sebastian Faulks

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear. — Sebastian Faulks

But you must live your own life eventually. You have one chance only. — Sebastian Faulks

But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it. — Sebastian Faulks

How do you 'clear' your thoughts? You have only other thoughts with which to do the job; 'thoughts', therefore, are both blockage and broom. I suppose what we mean is that we should stop reasoning and try to 'feel' - which presumes that what we 'feel' is more valuable than anything we think ... — Sebastian Faulks

I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible. — Sebastian Faulks

There is nothing more sir, than to love and be loved. — Sebastian Faulks

Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet ... a vole. It's a remarkable thing in its way, a vole - intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it ... Does it help? Does it move the matter on?
When you ask a question that you'd actually like to know the answer to - what was there before the Big Bang, for instance, or what lies beyond the expanding universe, why does life have this inbuilt absurdity, this non sequitur of death - they say that your question can't be answered, because the terms in which you've put it are logically unsound. What you must do, you see, is ask vole questions. Vole is - as we have agreed - the answer; so it follows that your questions must therefore all be vole-related. — Sebastian Faulks

If you have only one life, you can't altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it? — Sebastian Faulks

There is only one life; it is therefore perfect. — Sebastian Faulks

Weir heard something different in the sounds. Once, during a period of calm, he sat on the firestep waiting for Stephen to return from an inspection and listened to the music of the tins. The empty ones were sonorous, the fuller ones provided an ascending scale. Those filled to the brim produced only a fat percussive beat unless they overbalanced, when the cascade would give a loud variation. Within earshot there were scores of tins in different states of fullness and with varying resonance. Then he heard the wire moving in the wind. It set up a moaning background noise that would occasionally gust into prominence, then lapse again to mere accompaniment. He had to work hard to discern, or perhaps imagine, a melody in this tin music, but it was better in his ears than the awful sound of shellfire. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

I'm not going to miss all this, am I? — Sebastian Faulks

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it. — Sebastian Faulks

There you are, sir. There's nothing more than to love and be loved. — Sebastian Faulks

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us. — Sebastian Faulks

How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future. — Sebastian Faulks

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane? — Sebastian Faulks

The end-of-summer winds make people restless. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

You put your time where your priority is. — Sebastian Faulks

If only I could have my time again. — Sebastian Faulks

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

The more you're challenged, the more rigidly you assert your beliefs. You have nothing to lose because without your beliefs you're nothing anyway: they make you what you are. It's shit or bust. — Sebastian Faulks

Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do. — Sebastian Faulks

I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold. — Sebastian Faulks

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable. — Sebastian Faulks

I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time. — Sebastian Faulks

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

He didn't ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant. — Sebastian Faulks

Time makes us pointless. — Sebastian Faulks

There is an arch supported by four vast columns. Etched over hundreds and hundreds of yards of stone, furlongs of stone, there are names:
"Who are these, these? The men who died in this battle?"
"No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries."
"These are just the ... the unfound." When she could speak again. From the whole war?"
The man shook his head. "Just these fields."
Elizabeth sat on the steps. "No one told me. My God no one told me, — Sebastian Faulks

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

He threw up the conkers into the air in his great happiness. In the tree above him they disturbed a roosting crow, which erupted from the branches with an explosive bang of its wings, then rose up above him towards the sky, its harsh, ambiguous call coming back in long, grating waves towards the earth, to be heard by those still living. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

Something had been buried that was not yet dead. — Sebastian Faulks

Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them. — Sebastian Faulks

The physical shock took away the pain of being. — Sebastian Faulks

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

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not ... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing? — Sebastian Faulks

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs. — Sebastian Faulks

My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still. — Sebastian Faulks

The nicest characters in 'A Week in December' are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them. — Sebastian Faulks

Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart. — Sebastian Faulks

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? — Sebastian Faulks

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that. — Sebastian Faulks

It's possible there are no two books in publishing history more dissimilar than 'Human Traces' and 'Devil May Care.' And that was really the attraction of it. — Sebastian Faulks

He wanted also to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world's creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it. His body shook with the passion of the love that had found him, from which he had been exiled in the blood and the flesh of long killing. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

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. — Sebastian Faulks

There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived. — Sebastian Faulks

I saw an old woman dressed in seatcovers, sewn into a dress, a man in a jacket made from a flag. It gave them an air of desperate grandeur, like guests at an asylum ball. — Sebastian Faulks

Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real. — Sebastian Faulks

Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours. — 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. — Sebastian Faulks