Sebastian Faulks

“We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.”

“It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.”

“In the 1970s, British food was beginning to get good, whereas in France it was just starting its long, sad decline. My most memorable meals, however, have been in Italy.”

“My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It’s that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana’s don’t do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that’s different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn’t work. Sorry about that.”

“The physical shock took away the pain of being.”

“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”

“There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.”

“All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed.”