Michel Faber
Michel Faber
Michel Faberis a Dutch-born writer of English-language fiction, including his 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 April 1960
christmas pudding symbolic
'A Christmas Carol' is an extravagantly symbolic thing - as rich in symbols as Christmas pudding is rich in raisins.
fixing
When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'
churches militant quite record
For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.
attempting novels ran since
I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship.
tend
I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.
behave dismiss
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.
pages
In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.
exploring huge separates work
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.
fetch pathos poignancy work
Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required.
books good
Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.
can-do participating
Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.
danger allure threat
Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.
events life-is newspapers
Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events
embody few human people stories truth
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.