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
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Certainly, we all have within us the potential to live in a hugely different way. And how happy you can make yourself, I think, a lot depends on how much you beat yourself up about that; and how much you can, in some sort of providential way, console yourself and say, 'Well, it's all worked out for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.'
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The religion I know most about, which is the Christian one, would simply say that it's not really for one man or woman to know fully and to understand the nature of our brief human existence.
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I don't do interviews at home any more because my wife doesn't like having her taste in interiors put through the mill. And I get annoyed when journalists make snide remarks about the annoyingly pretentious shops in the neighbourhood - because I hate them just as much.
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I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people - to take them through the argument by dramatizing the circumstances in which these issues are being discussed.
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It is fair to say the New Testament is the most ethically sophisticated of the great scriptures; the proper comparison for the Qur'an is with the Old Testament - against which it holds its own.
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I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.
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It's possible there are no two books in publishing history more dissimilar than 'Human Traces' and 'Devil May Care.' And that was really the attraction of it.
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I've found contemporary Britain difficult to write about because it seems to me to have lacked gravity or grandeur. This is some cultural problem which I don't really understand. It simply isn't the same in the United States.
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I think my generation has had an unbelievably easy time profiting from the world that was made for us by our parents and grandparents. We are essentially a rather frivolous generation. The Blair government was my generation's shot at power. It had some good things, but it had some flaws.
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I don't know how you can understand other people or yourself if you haven't read a lot of books. I just don't think you're equipped to deal with the demands and decisions of life, particularly in your dealings with other people.
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There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.
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The nicest characters in 'A Week in December' are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.
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I believe your stomach tells you what it wants, and I don't think mine asks for anything that unhealthy. I'm a trained health machine.
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Bond doesn't have an inner life. There would be moments when I'd think, 'We need to gather our thoughts here and have a breather,' where in another novel you'd slow the pace, have some description and see what Bond feels about this. But Bond doesn't reflect. All you can do is move on to the next bomb or shark or car.