Michel Faber Quotes

It's funny because I think that genre literature can be looked down on by literature literature. And I like that! I like being scorned; I like people looking down their noses at us a little bit... It gives us a little chip on our shoulder.

I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.

I'm from Europe, and I was very aware that there are a lot of literature snobs - especially in Europe. As soon as something becomes a success, it has to be bad, and then they'll do everything they can to stab it to death.

There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal.

And I don't like books which are full of name dropping.

During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation.

In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart, so that you had serious fiction and genre fiction.

It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.

As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.

I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.

Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.

It's the time of year when the literati give advice on what we should be reading on our summer holidays. These terrifying lists often leave me appalled at my own ignorance, but also suspicious about the pretension of their advocates.

The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.

An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.

Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.

A novelist's sense that he or she is 'above' a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form.

I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.

I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.

I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language.

I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had.

I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian.

People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.

'Lady Chatterley's Lover' is a novel that constitutes a milestone of English literature.