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
agendas anyone cassettes cds constantly life listening lunatic music quite specific spent
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.
bad early erased life possibly reason remember sort trauma
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.
annoy characters dickens female inanimate invest life objects prose relish time
My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me.
events life-is newspapers
Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events
life destiny soul
A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.
books car lovers male manuals men serious
Before I was published, I thought men read car manuals or books about football. But once I started having really serious conversations with male lovers of literature, I let go of that prejudice.
danger few knew repeating
I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger of repeating myself.
books good
Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.
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.
author forced maybe obsessive success
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.
average hours music
On an average day, I spend 12 hours listening to music. Very little writing.
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.
pages
In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.
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.