Sebastian Faulks
Sebastian Faulks
Sebastian Charles Faulks CBEis a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is best known for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He has also published novels with a contemporary setting, most recently A Week in December, and a James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care, as well as a continuation of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells. He is a team captain on BBC Radio 4...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 April 1953
simple fire brain
I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.
derivatives commodity more-money
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.
enjoy cant ifs
If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?
providence indifferent
It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.
lonely struggle organisms
Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.
glee
. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .
half levels different
We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.
peace breathe silent
It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.
feelings alive inexplicable
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
sake paragraph
He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.
moments killing killing-myself
I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.
loss shots calmness
I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.
graves frivolous
I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.
loss thinking iran
It was too difficult. People weren't prepared to put in the hours on the donkey work - you know, dates and facts and so on. I think in retrospect my generation will be seen as a turning point. From now on there'll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in fourteenth-century Iran and modern London, though, is that if with their meager resources the villagers occasionally slipped backward, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.