Michel Faber

When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'

I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us - we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms - we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we're gone.

Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist.

I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write.

I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We're not going to get rid of that; it's just too scary to be that molecule flying around briefly in a vacuum.

My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I'm in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to.

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.

The mere fact of my novel being filmed means very little to me. For a long while after 'The Crimson Petal's publication in 2002, it looked as though Hollywood was going to adapt it.

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.

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.

I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.

One of the things that struck me about the 1870s, which we still haven't nearly addressed, is what to do about the male-female divide. One of the forbidden topics is when men own up to the omnivorousness of their sexual interest and how to square that with being in love with an individual woman.