Michel Faber Quotes

For all the splendours of the world's greatest galleries, visitors are likely to be kept at arm's length, spectators of a world that can seem too rarefied to let them in.

Stay out of the loop, the club, the inner circle.

I'm not invited. I'm not on the A list, haven't been on it in 20 years and my feet have never trod its red fluffy carpets.

I think I should be here alone to rethink the world - I do. I want these lesser humans gone.

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

The universities are available only to those who share my revolutionary beliefs.

If you feel like an outsider, you tend to observe things a lot more.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.

Lists are anti-democratic, discriminatory, elitist, and sometimes the print is too small.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Talent is very dangerous. It alienates people.

There are people who don't like popularity. It's much better to be exclusive and remote.

Everyone hates the best clubs, it is as simple as that.

The art world's quite elitist. I tend to skirt around that world.

I'm not clique-y.

Golf is elitist, it's stuffy, it's exclusive and I hate that because I am not that and I was never welcomed in and I'm still not welcomed in.

I've never felt opera was a party I've been invited to, and maybe I've got a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it.

You look around, and you think, 'Given the chance, if we can get away with it, people are going to be nasty to each other. They're going to pull up the draw bridge; they're going to draw up the ladder and try to live in this little bubble without giving anything to anyone else - without even receiving anything from anyone else.'

You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!

The Clique: The only thing harder then getting in is staying in.

I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.

I'm not going into the cool club. It's not my address.

I know I have within myself... a side of solitude. I think people who know me can see, but people who just meet me can't because I'm generally very fun and gregarious. I love to spend a lot of time on my own. I can seriously go into my own head and often love to let myself travel where I don't know where I'm going. I always felt that that was his kind of form of escape, in a way.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.