YouSaid · the spoken record

Sebastian Faulks

lines on the record: 48
first: 2009-03-29
most recent: 2009-03-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I've had periods of feeling sad and melancholy in my life, and I've through with that I just want to be happy, so I'll take Myles Davis what could make you feel better than Myles and John Coltrain and Cannibal”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I'm allowed to, I'd like to take a strip of coconut matting and a net, and some cricket stumps, a bat, a ball, and a bowling machine, with an endless supply of cricket balls, and a bowling machine can be programmed to be shane worn or Dennis Lilly or Gary Sobers or anyone you like, and I'm going to play a series of timeless tests in which I'm England and I'm going to play the rest of the world. But I shall also be the umpire, so it's possible that England will do rather better than they have done in reality”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was much harder than choosing the music. However, I've gone with Prust, the remembrance of things past, because it's the only novel I've ever read which made me just stop and bore anyone who was around by just reading out sentences again and again and again in just sort of wonder and it's just an extraordinary book and it would also have the added advantage of lasting rather a long time.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When my father died we had a memorial service for him, and the choir sang the Pierzu from the Requiem by Foray, and I don't think I really want to hear that too sort of poignant, but the sanctuous is a wonderful piece of music and it has a tremendous confidence and faith. It's as though everything is moving inevitably to a proper fitting and redemptive conclusion. I don't myself have this faith, but I tremendously envy people who do, and this is a very, very calming and uplifting piece of music.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suppose I live so much inside my head anyway. I frequently don't speak to anyone until seven o'clock in the evening. I get up quite late and by the time I go off to work everyone's gone out of the house I sometimes don't utter until seven thirty in the evening. So all that's going to be pretty familiar and I am actually one of the least practical men in the world. You're talking about what one inherits from parents. That's something I seem to have inherited from my father who, as far as I remember, couldn't even change a plug. There's going to be very little DIY and handy shelters. It's going to be very, very rudimentary. Well, you've seen my room as photographed newspaper”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think she was thrilled that both of us had done things that we wanted to do and seemed happy and both married and all that, and I took her along to Buckingham Palace when I got a gong and she was absolutely thrilled to bits with that, and that was one of her last outings actually. So no, I think that we can say that they both got good value ready.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, my father died in nineteen ninety eight, and he'd seen my brother Edward take silk, and he'd seen certainly some of my books he'd seen Bird Song and a couple of others. I think he was slightly worried that I would ever sort of get anything together by the time he died he was felt very happy, I think.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“America is a country that's also meant a lot to me, and I remember once flying over Manhattan coming into land and I had this huge fistful of whiskey on ice in my right hand, and on the headphones was Myles Davis, and this is a track called Myles.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We keep life very simple. We have a very ordinary life and no, I'm not very organized, and I never remember what I'm supposed to be doing from one day to the other, but my wife's very good, and she sends me emails, actually, says Don't forget six o'clock tonight, blah, blah, blah. So we manage.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and these one wonderful but oppressive and appalling buildings, the only one that was still functioning as such that I was able to get into was Broadmoor, but I got in there and of course when I looked down from Broadmoor which is set on a hill above Crowthorne in Berkshire down in the plain was where I'd been at school Wellington. The asylum took the high ground for the views and the school took the low ground for the playing field. Every Monday morning during double physics there the alarm at Broadmoor would go off It was quite strange. You have this feeling of life coming round.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had no idea how squalid it was until I saw that picture, but I just don't care what it looks like, because when I'm there I'm not really there anyway, I'm in an imagined world, so I just as long as it works, I just couldn't care less what it looks like.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it wasn't quite like being channeled. I didn't want to be inhabited by Fleming. I think the cigarette smoke would have driven me crazy for a start. I've seen.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was a casting against type, I think. I'd just written human traces which was five years in a Victorian lunatic asylum, and I was quite keen to do something different. Anyway, the truth of the matter is it was intensely good fun. It took me six weeks to write, which is what Fleming took to write his bond books, and I figured out how he wrote, which wasn't very hard to figure out, because it's a newspaper man style, basically.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Track number six Joni Mitchell I think she is such a remarkable artist who's done something which would be absolutely suicidal for a novelist but worked as a singer performer which is I think she lived her life as material for songs and I heard this song when I was about twenty two and quite myself quite romantic and susceptible and it's called Help Me.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's been fifteen years in development, but the film world is a slow place. The truth is that most serious books are too long, too complex, and too inward to transfer successfully to the screen. So if there is no film of bird song that's fine by me, it's either a good film or it's no film, don't let's go off at half”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's exactly right. It was very upsetting, I was frequently quite overcome and would have to get up, walk around the room, go outside into the garden, you know, take a breather. But you cannot just pound the typewriter keys with tears in your eyes. That's not going to communicate itself. What you have to do is calm down and very methodically and carefully pick the details which are likely to evoke in the reader the response that you've had. You have to have the splinter of ice in the heart. This sounds very manipulative and cold hearted, but you know underneath I did have quite an idealistic motive. I didn't want the events of fourteen eighteen and the texture of that experience and its significance in human history to be forgotten.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I did, and when I first mentioned to my publisher that I was setting a book during the First World War, she held her head in her hand. I felt that this was material that I would probably only approach full once in my life, and I did feel that it was pretty important not to mess this one up, and I knew that I risked falling very, very flat on my face if I got it wrong.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slightly hairy well we had my wife and I had one child and another one on the way, and so having no income was slightly worrying, I suppose but Veronica my wife was incredibly helpful and calm and she backed me up all the way.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The papers merged and all the senior editors got that their job ceased to exist. Which was absolutely fantastic for me because I had a year's worth of money, I think it was, so I know how a chance to see if I could just write.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, yeah, that was. It was exciting, wasn't it? It was very exciting. I love journalism and I gave it my best shot, but it wasn't ultimately what I wanted to do. And luckily, journalism regurgitated me a few years later in nineteen ninety one, by which time I was on the Sunday paper The Independent on Sunday.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By this time I had left I'd been at the telegraph the Sunday telegraph I was then at the Independent which launched in nineteen eighty six.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next track is from Steely Dan, who, in most people's view who know about these things are what happened after the Beatles and the Beach Boys and before whatever happened after I stopped listening to pop music. This song reminds me of all the times, I suppose, between the ages of about eighteen and thirty eight when I got married, going out in the evening and before going out, I suppose I went out about three hundred times a year for eighteen years. That's a lot of going out. And before you go out, you want to have a drink and get in the mood, and no one did it better than Steely Dan.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and as we were walking along this old man Doc Wilson suddenly was brought up short because he was staring at the headstone which had his friend Maltby's name on it, and what had happened is someone clearly in nineteen fifteen had found this wooden cross and given him a proper funeral and he hadn't realized and so here we were seventy years later whatever it was and he just stood in front of it saying Oh I say oh I say and it was a very moving moment and the first world war then became to me something that moved out of history off a shelf and became something that came within tangible literally tangible reach and I felt emboldened after that to think that maybe the book that had been in the back of my mind for a long time a book set during the First World War was not impossibly ambitious but could possibly be pulled off.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, that was a bit later on in nineteen eighty eight, which was the seventieth anniversary of the armistice, I went with a party of veterans, and of course, in those days there still were quite a lot of survivors of the First World War, and I remember standing with this guy of a bad must have been in his mid nineties. His name was Doc Wilson, and he was holding my hand as old men sometimes do, and we were standing looking down at the mud, and he said, Over there that was the German line. You can still see there was still a sort of ruined pillbox. And he said, I was standing here and my best friend Maltby was standing next to me, and part of a German shell came and took him and exploded him into several small pieces, and I picked them up each one no bigger than a leg of mutton and put them in a sandbag, and I made a wooden cross and I put him about ten yards over there. I said that's terrible. Anyway that evening we were walking through one of the battles.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, as you can imagine, this is something I've puzzled over a lot and it connects to what I was saying before about the thinness I found of contemporary life in England. Above all for me what happened going there in the seventies and early eighties was a sense that the past was much more available. It was like driving back into the thirties or even into the twenties.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music is by a French singer called Charles Trunet. France has been a big part of my life, particularly my writing life, and what I like about this song enquiton laville is that its Trenet was a ridiculous character and it's a ridiculous song very perky, jolly, absurd, but underneath it it has got that awful sort of melancholy of departure and people saying goodbye to one another.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was called London Day by Day and no one else on the diary column was much interested in art, so I used to go off and do a lot of galleries and I was supposed to cover the sort of literary world in theory I had some sort of connections in that. But as the editor of the column put it to me, well of course other days we just drink and it was a very, very boozy culture which suited me down to the ground.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was about twenty six when I joined what had in fact been my grandfather's old paper as the sort of most junior runner on the diary column.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I never felt particularly guilty about not fighting. I felt incredibly relieved about not fighting, actually, but I think the problem for me really was that the modern world I lived in in England seemed to be very lightweight and very lacking in texture, lacking in a sense of emergency, lacking in depth, and I found that the books that were being written at that time in the seventies, the novels were very, very frivolous, and they were what became scornfully known as the Hamstead novel, you know, adultery, television producer lives next door to a journalist.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I just it just took me a long time to work out first of all how it was done and secondly to find what I wanted to say, and I wrote three or four novels in my twenties, completed them, and they just weren't any good I came across one the other day in a box and it was quite staggeringly bad I mean really much worse than you'd imagine”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I ever quite got the idea of jacking everything in, but it certainly took me a very long time to get going as a writer.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I knew from the age of about fourteen or fifteen that I wanted to be a writer. There was a sort of moment, I think, of revelation really when I started to read grown up books for the first time, and it just seemed to me that there was nothing in the world that was as worth doing as writing novels.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father suggested I should become a diplomat, but I was just wasn't ready for it I was just too confused and young and so on. So when I left university I did what a lot of people with English degrees do, which is just look through the small ads and eventually I found a job teaching in a private school, which is not really what I wanted to do long term, but I had to pay the rent.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music Well, when I was about ten or eleven, Edwin and I used to listen to the radio a lot. We liked pop music, but something explosive happened in about sixty two sixty three. and I remember looking at Edward and him looking at me and thinking God I didn't know life could be this exciting and if it's going to be like this let's get going and I could have chosen any of the beetles early singles but I've chosen this one because I think this is Edward's favourite too.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was kind of embarrassing, but everyone smoked like crazy. You smoked on television then, and so my parents watched this, and they were absolutely appalled at their sort of nineteen year old son behind these clouds of smoke, and we had been out to the pub beforehand because the producer said that's a good idea, so we drank about six barley wines each, which didn't really help our performance and we were thrashed by someone else Glasgow, I think it was.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people who get hung up on school days and how many O levels they got are really rather pathetic. You know, life's considerably more interesting now, I find. I mean, there's people I know who are always boasting that they got seven A stars or something. I mean, really, there is much more to life than that.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was pushed through these things quickly because in those days you could, and there was a chance I was going to leave school before my voice broke actually, but which would have been great because the school I was at by then Wellington I was considerably less sympathetic but on the other hand you know I had friends and if you make friends anything as tolerable really.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, indeed didn't have to, but I think that my parents thought it would be a good idea we'd get better educated. So off we went to a funny little boarding school. I was there in the nineteen sixties. It could really be the eighteen sixties, but I loved it. And I was also quite competitive. It was a very competitive school. They were always reading out your, you know, marks and orders every week you could see your placement in the form, and if you came top you got five shillings or something at the end of term. So it was, you know, highly incentivized.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was, you know, we got on very well, and she took great pride and interest in both of us, but as for the sort of depiction of women, we are now allowed to admit, I think, those wars having been fought and won. We are now allowed to admit that there are small but significant differences between most men and most women. And one of the more interesting ones to play around with is the idea that men don't really inspect in a continuous way their inner lives and feelings and their development of their states of mind, whereas women tend to keep a more running audit. And it seemed to me that this gave some dramatic possibility to a novelist if you have a woman's inner life which is kind of quite continuously introspective and a man's which is only intermittently so you immediately have some kind of friction or possibly fruitful tension there.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this actually I first heard with my mother. It's a ravel piano concerto, the slow movement, and I was standing with her in the kitchen at home when I was about twenty twenty one, and I was very unhappy at this time, and I remember just hearing this absolutely beautiful piece of music my mother was trying to sort of encourage me and say don't worry everything will come out all right. And years later when I was married I discovered that my wife had also quite independently loved this piece of music and we used to listen to it when driving round a rather beautiful part of southern France in the Auvergne so it's A lovely piece of music and B, it reminds me of the sort of the poles of near despair and great happiness.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that my father handed on a wonderful example of fairness that was his principal quality, I think he was terribly fair minded and very, very humorous, but he was also kind, and from my mother, I think we got books, music, painting, theatre, and she took us off to galleries and to the theatre a great deal, but I also learned from her I think the sort of importance of courage and sticking at things.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, my mother's father fought in World War I, and then during the Second World War he was a newspaper man, he was a reporter. Towards the end of the Second World War the telegraph where he worked had run short of reporters, and he volunteered to go with the Americans as they were pushing through eastern France across the Rhine into Germany, and he was killed on a bridge at Remargum crossing the Rhine by a German sniper, so having survived as a soldier, he then died as a journalist.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“excitement of a chance to start again to live a life for my mother to have a family, a happy family that she hadn't had as a child, and for my father just the chance of actually being alive without a bullet in you.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My recollection of home is of being very happy and having a wonderful time I had an older brother, Edward, who is about two and a half years older than I am, and we had wonderful games. My parents both of them had quite difficult lives up until this point because my father was settling in to work as a lawyer in nineteen thirty nine when the war broke out, and he then had seven very active years in Northern Europe, North Africa, Italy in trenches he was shot in the army, he was shot through the head and left for dead at Anzio. If you've seen a lot of people killed, including many of your friends, your other, looking forward to a second chance at life, and my mother had had rather a difficult upbringing because she was brought up by her grandparents, her parents not being particularly interested in her. They met by chance in nineteen forty eight, and Edward was born in nineteen fifty, and I think that what came over to Edward and me in our childhood was this great sense of”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is an American singer called Boz Skaggs, who was briefly popular here in the seventies. His voice has got better and better as it's got rustier and smokier, and I was driving down to stay with some great friends of ours in France. They have this beautiful barn overlooking a river, and I was with my eldest child William, and I thought I knew all Bosk's songs, but then this absolutely beautiful, haunting, sad song came on, so it reminds me of him and all my life, but also of the very happy times we've had on holiday.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose she does really. I mean, she doesn't actually see me writing, but I remember she came to my office. I don't work in the house, I have an office about ten minutes walk away, and she looked up at the wall, and she saw the endless charts and diagrams of plots and characters and the analysis of case histories, and I do a lot of drawing and I drawn several of the buildings in the book, and she looked at them and she just was overwhelmed really. I don't think she really appreciated that how much of my life was away.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find it very gratifying, I suppose I don't find it extraordinary because that is the magic that one is trying to work. My wife has this theory that I write novels because I'm so bored with life, bored with other people as she put it rather mournfully. But that's not quite true. It's that I'm unsatisfied with life, and I do find that by imposing an artistic shape on it, that makes it easier to deal with.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose it is, I think a lot of novelists set out to impose a shape on the world which otherwise were in danger of finding completely incomprehensible human beings have this terrible curse, it's the curse of consciousness, it's what first happens to Adam and Eve when they acquire self awareness. The dog and the woodlouse and the tortoise all live quite happily because they don't really understand that they're going to die, but we live in this ridiculous shaggy dog story, which can only end one way. And I think that one of the important things that serious novels do is to try to give a comfort reassurance and a sense of redemption to what is otherwise a really meaningless sequence of events.”
2009-03-29 · Desert Island Discs · Sebastian Faulks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source