Zitat des Tages von Michel Faber:
The family I grew up in was very inflexible and harsh. It left me with the feeling that if you do let somebody down badly, then even if they tell you it's all right, it cannot be all right.
Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it.
Modern politicians like Cameron dream of exerting paternal influence without being seen as paternalistic, of fostering moral behaviour without being considered moralistic.
Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist.
I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them.
I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship.
All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.
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.
For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.
My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I'm in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to.
I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
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.
I don't remember my childhood very well for one reason or another, possibly childhood trauma or possibly just a very bad memory. My early life has sort of been erased from my memory banks.
So many books that have Christian characters but are written by atheists mercilessly pillory and mock and question the motives of people with faith. I'm past all that.
In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.
One of the things my success as an author has forced me to face is how dysfunctional... Maybe that's a strong word, but how obsessive I am.
By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.
I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We're not going to get rid of that; it's just too scary to be that molecule flying around briefly in a vacuum.
At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
The mere fact of my novel being filmed means very little to me. For a long while after 'The Crimson Petal's publication in 2002, it looked as though Hollywood was going to adapt it.
Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.
If someone's a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin.
In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.
I'm constantly listening to music and thinking about it and compiling my own cassettes and CDs in obsessively specific order. I have quite lunatic agendas for what I want to achieve. They won't make sense to anyone other than me, but it is what I've spent most of my life doing.
I never, ever want to be in a position where people are sitting round a table, saying, 'We've got this book. I don't really get it, but we paid for it, so we've got to sell it.' I'm not Tony Parsons; that's not right for me.
I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write.
