Top 17 Sebastian Faulks Quotes

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.

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.

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

If you have only one life, you can’t altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

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.

I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.

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.

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.

The nicest characters in ‘A Week in December‘ are, in fact, Muslims – and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.