Michel Faber Quotes

You can't learn pathos or profundity.

The portal structure is simply a technique: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary, except as the writer and the story make it so. In the case of 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,' it was absolutely necessary to my intentions.

Dialogue's a method of revelation, of course. A few words of dialogue can reveal worlds about a character.

We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.

To make wail and lament for one's ill fortune, when one will win a tear from the audience, is well worthwhile.

I'm manipulating the audience. I'm making sure people sympathize.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

In true demagogic fashion, Trump bypassed the head and spoke directly to the gut, to the biles and bubbling acids of raw emotion.

I try not to be overly nostalgic, and I don't use nostalgia to be kitschy.

Critics, how I would love if you could clear the word 'sentimental' from your minds.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

The way a story makes an argument is quite different from the way a persuasive essay does it. Emotional truth and the logic of metaphors dominate.

I don't usually like teen novels written in the present tense, particularly those told from a first-person viewpoint. Too many writers seem to believe that using either or both devices automatically imbues their stories with deep seriousness and a contemporary feel.

Music can make you go from sadness to an immense sadness. There is a limit; if you go too far, it becomes schmaltzy.

One tires of a page of which every sentence sparkles with points, of a sentimentalist who is always pumping the tears from his eyes or your own.

Demagogues are so easy to identify. They gesture a lot and speak with pulpit rhythms, using words that ring of religious fervour and god-fearing sincerity. Sincerity with nothing behind it takes so much practice. The practice can always be detected. Repetition. Great attempts to keep your attention on words.

Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.

A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

Believe me, nothing is so calculated to lose you audience sympathy as too many tears. Move your listeners all you can but let them do the crying.

If you would write emotionally, be first unemotional. If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry.

The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.