Fay Weldon Quotes

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

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

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

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.

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?

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.

I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.