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
heart knowing matter
Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.
self joy naked
This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.
sorry consistency special
My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that.
modesty thunder false-modesty
The thunder of false modesty was deafening.
years may months
I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be
depression years black
Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.
lonely struggle organisms
Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.
sake paragraph
He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.
war wings effort
He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.
buried
Something had been buried that was not yet dead.
brain matter individual
If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.
dream eye thinking
Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.
reflection soul void
I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.
moving years breathing
If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?