Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Fay Weldon - Page 2

There was no such thing as defeat if you didn't accept it.

Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it.

If infinity is as they describe it, all things are not just possible but in the end certain.

Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.

If you wake up in the morning with a great sense of the things that have to be done in the day in order to get through to the next day, you lose the sense of the day as any kind of end in itself.

by and large, nothing is as bad as you fear, or as good as you hope.

Prudence says one thing, desire says another, and I'd rather go with desire any time.

one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.

Sound waves do not die out. They travel forever and forever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity.

Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

If you put a woman in a man's position, she will be more efficient, but no more kind.

Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.

As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women.

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

Men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men.

People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an Order of the British Empire goes on for ever.

one tends to suspect others of what one is guilty of oneself. The unfaithful wife is quick to suspect the husband of infidelity.

I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.

memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.

I know truth is more like a mountain that has to be scaled. The peak of the mountain pierces the clouds and can only rarely be seen, and has never been reached. And what you see of it, moreover, depends upon the flank of the mountain you stand upon, and how exhausted getting even so far has made you. Virtue lies in looking upwards, toiling upwards, and sometimes joyously leaping from one precarious crag of fact and feeling to the next.

Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.

Food is the supremest of pleasures.

Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.

No one should be allowed to give back the gift of life, unless they are very old and full of tears, when the body outlives the spirit, when they should be allowed to join the others who've already gone.

What makes women happy? Nothing, for more than ten minutes at a time, so stop worrying.

Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth; left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.

You will find that women who are pregnant often don't want to be and women who aren't desperately envy those who are. Labour wards are always full of very punitive people.

Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.

My experience of men in cars has always been that if you don't want them to do something, they will. It is when they are behind a wheel that they most fear the control of women and children.

Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on.

Another thing that seems quite helpful to the creative process is having babies. It does not detract at all from one's creativity. It reminds one that there is always more where that came from and there is never any shortage of ideas or of the ability to create. The process of being pregnant and then of having the baby and getting up in the night only puts one more in touch with this fecund part of one's self.

Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it.

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state?

Because clearly the most amazing thing had happened: by some chance - no, the lover does not believe in chance, but destiny - destiny had arranged it so that the man and woman who had made the original whole, then somehow divided and separated by an angry God, had met up again, and now must reform the rightful, righteous whole. At once!

Pride is what you can afford or think you can afford.

I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

I like the dry-cleaners. I like the sense of refreshment and renewal. I like the way dirty old torn clothes are dumped, to be returned clean and wholesome in their slippery transparent cases. Better than confesssion any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth, redemption, salvation.