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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
There’s no such thing as identity: it’s something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable. Sebastian Faulks Read Quote
There aren’t many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called ‘Horned Pigeon.’ He had been on the run and hadn’t eaten for a week, and his description of the cheese fondue he smells in the peasant kitchen of a house in eastern France is unbelievable. Sebastian Faulks Read Quote
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 Read Quote
