Sebastian faulks

My parents' generation didn't have any understanding of psychology or emotion or individual temperament. In fact, they were slightly embarrassed by all those words.

Why would a novel - which is all about the inward processes of people's developing feelings and developing relationships - why would you be able to portray that in pictures with as few words as...

My ideal relationship with the reader is that at certain points they will have said, 'I'm finding this quite tough, but I'm going to hang in there,' then at the end they will say, 'Oh God, I'm glad I...

To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying:...

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.

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...

If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because...

In the 1970s, British food was beginning to get good, whereas in France it was just starting its long, sad decline. My most memorable meals, however, have been in Italy.

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...

I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.