Sebastian Faulks

There aren't many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called 'Horned Pigeon.' He had been on the run and hadn't eaten for a week, and his description of the cheese fondue he smells in the peasant kitchen of a house in eastern France is unbelievable.

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

There is an arch supported by four vast columns. Etched over hundreds and hundreds of yards of stone, furlongs of stone, there are names: "Who are these, these? The men who died in this battle?""No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries.""These are just the ... the unfound." When she could speak again. From the whole war?"The man shook his head. "Just these fields."Elizabeth sat on the steps. "No one told me. My God no one told me,

People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose you

There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.

I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.

He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do.

She was so beautiful I had to move away.

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?