Sebastian Faulks Quotes

As a writer, you rely on whatever makes you up as a person, whether those things are twisted and nasty or otherwise.

I think you have to know who you are. Get to know the monster that lives in your soul, dive deep into your soul and explore it.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

I'm not the dude with the message. I'm a human being with different sides, different shades and different emotions, different feelings.

I want to explore the range of emotions it is possible to feel.

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

I think the better you know yourself as a person, the better an actor you can be.

It is profound philosophy to sound the depths of feeling and distinguish traits of character. Men must be studied as deeply as books.

That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.

All who know their own minds know not their own hearts.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.

No person can ever know everything that is in the heart of another. We are all Face Dancers in our souls.

It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.

I think as you mature as an actor things open up to you in a lot of ways, especially if you do work on yourself.

People don't know. We don't know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who've left us is because we knew them so well.

This business of really knowing people, deep down, including your own self, it is not something you can learn in school or from a book. It takes your whole being to do it—your eyes and your ears, your brain and your heart. Maybe your heart most of all. —Bobby Goodspeed

Theoretically, the actor ought to be more sound in mind and body than other people, since he learns to understand the psychological problems of human beings when putting his own passions, his loves, fears, and rages to work in the service of the characters he plays. He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself- and to do so takes AN INSATIABLE CURIOSITY ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION

What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!

The book that I shall make people read is the book of the heart, which holds the key to the mystery of life

I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence.

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.

To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.

The gift of creative reading, like all natural gifts, must be nourished or it will atrophy. And you nourish it, in much the same way you nourish the gift of writing - you read, think, talk, look, listen, hate, fear, love, weep - and bring all of your life like a sieve to what you read. That which is not worthy of your gift will quickly pass through, but the gold remains.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.