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

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

All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something. — Sebastian Faulks

Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror. — 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

He looked at Azaire, and his left eyelid slid down over the eyeball, remaining in place long enough for the broken blood vessels beneath the skin and the small wart to be visible before it was rotated smoothly back to its home beneath the skull. — Sebastian Faulks

No, I want to take you out back and beat your fucking head on the floor. — Sebastian Faulks

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards. — Sebastian Faulks

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

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

There had always seemed to me a frightening amount of chance in the way that people chose their careers. — Sebastian Faulks

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

The more I heard, the less I knew. — 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

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

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

I felt trapped in a world that I couldn't mould to my own desires. Others were in sunlight; I was in darkness. — Sebastian Faulks

I am something of a connoisseur of the country pile and I must say {he} had done himself remarkably well. At a guess I would say it was from the reign of Queen Anne and had been bunged up by some bewigged ancestor awash with loot from the War of the Spanish Succession or some such lucrative away fixture. — Sebastian Faulks

These are things that help me if not lose then leave behind, what else, my self. — 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

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

That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only. — Sebastian Faulks

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

All that once I'd known, I had forgotten. — 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

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

My parents' generation didn't have any understanding of psychology or emotion or individual temperament. In fact, they were slightly embarrassed by all those words. — Sebastian Faulks

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

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened. — 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

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 — 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

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

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

You can't recall someone whose name has worn away. — Sebastian Faulks

I don't do interviews at home any more because my wife doesn't like having her taste in interiors put through the mill. And I get annoyed when journalists make snide remarks about the annoyingly pretentious shops in the neighbourhood - because I hate them just as much. — 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

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts. — Sebastian Faulks

Something had been buried that was not yet dead. — 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

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

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

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. — Sebastian Faulks

I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke. — Sebastian Faulks

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

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

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

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing. — Sebastian Faulks

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

He really was a prize ass. — 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

One of the young officers was playing a piano in the corner, although not all the men were singing the same song. — Sebastian Faulks

In the 1970s, British food was beginning to get good, whereas in France it was just starting its long, sad decline. My most memorable meals, however, have been in Italy. — 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

They saw the Scots coming up out of their burrows like raving women in their skirts, dying in ripples across the yellowish-brown soil. They saw the steady tread of the Hampshire's as though they had willingly embarked on a slow-motion dance from which they were content not to return. They saw men from every corner walking, powerless, into an engulfing storm. — 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

I think my generation has had an unbelievably easy time profiting from the world that was made for us by our parents and grandparents. We are essentially a rather frivolous generation. The Blair government was my generation's shot at power. It had some good things, but it had some flaws. — 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

If you're mad enough to have killed a dozen people you're mad enough to be a fraction impatient. Surely? — Sebastian Faulks

Then the door flew open and Mr. Faulks told us to head over to the gym. I thought that was really smart. Get all of us in one place so the aliens didn't have to waste a lot of ammunition. — Rick Yancey

It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one. — 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

All my books are about one major idea and two or three subsidiary ones. I have thought a lot about music when constructing books, and I like the way in music that themes come back. — 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

We have lived too closely, been through too much. I will not leave you. I cannot, any more than I can leave myself. — 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

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

It is fair to say the New Testament is the most ethically sophisticated of the great scriptures; the proper comparison for the Qur'an is with the Old Testament - against which it holds its own. — 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

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

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.' — Sebastian Faulks

As she made coffee in the kitchen and tried to spoon the frozen ice-cream from its carton without snapping the shaft off the spoon, Elizabeth was struck, not for the first time, by the thought that her life was entirely frivolous.
It was a rush and slither of trivial crises; of uncertain cash-flow, small triumphs, occasional sex and too many cigarettes; of missed deadlines that turned out not to matter; of arguments, new clothes, bursts of altruism and sincere resolutions to address the important things. Of all these and the other experiences that made up her life, the most significant aspect was the one suggested by the words 'turned out not to matter'. Although she was happy enough with what she had become, it was this continued sense of the easy, the inessential nature of what she did, that most irritated her. She thought of Tom Brennan, who had known only life or death, then death in life. In her generation there was no intensity. — 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

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

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently. — Sebastian Faulks

He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time. — 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

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

Gray stood up and came round the desk. "Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. But listen." He put his face close to Stephen's. "There are four words they will chisel beneath them at the bottom. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. 'Final advance and pursuit.' Don't tell me you don't want to put your name to those words. — Sebastian Faulks

And when I die all the memories of my own life will go to the grave with me, God willing, and Dick will never have to look back at them. And his children will never even know what my life was like. They'll know nothing of grinding stones and being hungry and ashamed all day and being beaten by a teacher who couldn't write himself and being sure you kept your mind so empty that you had no thoughts at all. And that's what I've done for them, that's my gift to them and to all their children ever after, so don't talk to me about being hard. — Sebastian Faulks