Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Fay Weldon

Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.

Men are irrelevant.

People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe.

The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.

Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends.

Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.

The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies.

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application - practice. What you practice is what you manifest.

No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction.

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.

I didn't even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books.

I learned that sex was not a question of victory or defeat, of pleasure or profit: of a hand's manipulation and a physical response: I learned that in its purest pleasure it belongs to neither of those who practise it, in the same way as a child belongs to neither parent: it is a free spirit: it simply exists.

The prophets of doom, in my experience, are generally ignored and usually right.

Never defend yourself; agree with your critics, it takes the wind out of their sails.

She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.

Marriage is a very difficult relationship for nearly everyone and I'm sure you shouldn't do it if you want a quiet little easy life.

A woman's body works as if it knew something she didn't, and does not have her best interests at heart. If you need to look your best it will deliver you a pimple; if you don't want it to, your period will start early; if you want a baby badly your body refuses to give you one; if you are content in your life, lo, you are pregnant.

To the happy all things come: happiness can even bring the dead back to life. It is our resentments, our dreariness, our hate and envy, unrecognized by us, which keeps us miserable. Yet these things are in our heads, not out of our hands; we own them. We can throw them out if we choose.

Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.

Preserve your peace of mind. There is not much time; all things end in death. Do not lament the past too much, or fear the future too acutely, ot waste too much energy on other peoples' woes, in case the present dissolves altogether.

Nowadays most people wear black most of the time anyway: go to a literary party and one would imagine everyone there was in perpetual mourning for their lives.

When today's young woman says she isn't a feminist what she means is she isn't a lesbian and she doesn't hate men, she likes to wear make-up and she enjoys a laugh. In which she is no different from many an early feminist.

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her.

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually

How has anyone ever understood anyone, except through love, which is wordless?

I was always furious because you couldn't take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o'clock. The library didn't shut till half past, but you couldn't change the books till the next day.

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

Every time you open your wardrobe, you look at your clothes and you wonder what you are going to wear. What you are really saying is 'Who am I going to be today?

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.

Marriage is what happens when one at least of the partners doesn't want the other to get away.

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.

It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

If I am a prolific writer and turn my hand, with what seems to some as indecent haste, from novels to screenplays to stage and radio plays, it is because there is so much to be said, so few of us to say it, and time runs out.

The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself... They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.

Because one cause is bad does not make the opposing cause good.

Instinct' usually just means our conditioning to believe this or believe that, without thinking to investigate.

Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.

I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?

One can learn, at least. One can go on learning until the day one is cut off.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.

A woman has all too much substance in a man's eyes at the best of times. That is why men like women to be slim. Her lack of flesh negates her. The less of her there is, the less notice he need take of her. The more like a male she appears to be, the safer he feels.

I was seduced by secrets, which are to true love as artificial sweetener is to sugar, calorie-free but in the long run carcinogenic, not the real thing, and only a peculiar aftertaste in the mouth to tell you so, to warn you.

A 'weakness,' I now realize, is nothing but a strength not properly developed.

One friend dies and we remain indifferent; another dies, perhaps less intimate, and we see ourselves as dead, and weep, mourn, tear our hair or find ourselves caught up in the madness of the wake, competing with others as to who was closest, now suffers most.

One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits.

Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.

Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much.

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.

People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

Letters crossing in the post, unfamiliar tunes heard three times in one day, the way that blows of fate descend upon the same bowed shoulders, and the beams of good fortune glow perpetually upon the blessed. Fairy tales, as I said, are lived out daily. There is far more going on in the world than we ever imagine.