Fay Weldon famous quotes

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.
-- Fay Weldon

#Unexpected #Awareness

Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.
-- Fay Weldon

#Everything Happens For A Reason

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine
-- Fay Weldon

#Wine #Motherhood #Guilt

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Running #Sibling #Order

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

#Beauty #Giving #Firsts

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Friends #Children #Men

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Hair #Mourning #Suffering

Food is the supremest of pleasures.
-- Fay Weldon

#Pleasure

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

#Self #Expression #People

Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much.
-- Fay Weldon

#Too Much #Have Courage #Boldness

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

#Children #Men #Disadvantages

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

#Children #People #Failing

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Space #Giving #Poetry

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

#Learning #Cutting #Goes On

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

#Writing #Learning #States

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

#Believe #Mean #Thinking

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Life #Blessed #Fate

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Circles #Forever #Sound

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

#Fiction #Elements #Literature

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

#Wind #Sail #Critics

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Morning #Order #Live In The Moment

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

#Desire #Prudence

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

#Believe #Destiny #Chance

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

#Nuisance

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

#Infinity #Eternity #Ends

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

#Thinking #People #Expectations

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

#Hope #Fear #Expectations

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

#Understanding #Fiction #Literature

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

#Want #Partners #Get Away

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Want #Littles #Quiet

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

#Writing #Practice #Peculiar

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.
-- Fay Weldon

#Writing #People #Generosity

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Loneliness #Giving #New Day

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Writing #Gathering #Thorns

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Writing #Occupation #Profession

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

#Simple #Rough Times #Simple Things

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Reality #Thinking #Light

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

#Writing #Style #Looks

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

#Weakness #Realizing #Shortcomings

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Running #Real #Long

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

#Husband #Wife #Infidelity

Pride is what you can afford or think you can afford.
-- Fay Weldon

#Pride #Thinking

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

#Stubborn #Poverty

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

#Ignored #Pessimism #Prophet

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

#Memories #Thinking #Wishful Thinking

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Lying #Congratulations #School

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

#Doe #Causes #Logic

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Baby #Creativity #Night

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Husband #Emotional #New Life

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

#Marriage #Love Is #Way

I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.
-- Fay Weldon

#Ordinary #Ordinary Person #Extremes

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually
-- Fay Weldon

#Wells

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

#Perseverance #Defeat #Accepting

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Pain #Women #Enemy

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

#Fall #Support #Novelists

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Sex #Hate #Hungry

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

#Baby #Sex #Abortion

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Hate #Mean #Men

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Real #Writing #Stories

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

#Men #Feminist #Unhappy

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

#Acceptance #Men #Kind

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Book #Reading #Cities

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

#Cynical #Next

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

#Definitions #Facts #Habit

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

#Sex #Men #Feedback

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

#Believe #Recycling #Kind

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

#Sorry #Men #Wonder

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

#Confidence #Writing #Impossible

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Dirty #Clothes #Redemption

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?
-- Fay Weldon

#Clothes #Looks #Today

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Party #Clothes #People

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Happiness #Hate #Hands

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Mother #Children #Eye

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Children #Men #Car

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Book #Reading #Home

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Book #Reading #Character

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Eye #Men #Males

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Baby #Heart #Giving

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

#Real #Self #Biographies

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Giving #Tears #Gone

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.
-- Fay Weldon

#Ambition #Achievement #Should

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

#Acceptance #Effort #Tides

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.
-- Fay Weldon

#Running #Hands #Play

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

#Practice #Mind #Affirmation