Fay Weldon Quotes

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

There is nothing, she would think, more delicious that the icing of bought chocolate cake, eaten in the silence and privacy of the night.

Men are irrelevant.

She described how Camus's aphorism "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" helps her fight back against unproductive feelings of meaninglessness.
If we consider, like Camus, Sisyphus at the foot of his mountain, we can see that he is smiling. He is content in his task of defying the Gods, the journey more important than the goal. To achieve a beginning, a middle, an end, a meaning to the chaos of creation - that's more than any deity seems to manage: But it's what writers do. So I tidy the desk, even polish it up a bit, stick some flowers in a vase and start.
As I begin a novel I remind myself as ever of Camus's admonition that the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. And even while thinking, well, fat chance! I find courage, reach for the heights, and if the rock keeps rolling down again so it does. What the hell, start again. Rewrite. Be of good cheer. Smile on, Sisyphus!

Better to live with the guilty secret than the open truth of their life together - that they were bound by the habit of illicit lust, mutual degradation.

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

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

Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.

For who ever lived totally as they wanted to; who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.

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

Because lurking somewhere beneath the surface of your brain is a vision of loneliness, and it will be a terrible moment when it breaks through, and you realise that your future is not a green pastures, but the knackers yard. We are all separate people, and we are all alone. It is a ridiculous thing to say that no man is an island. We are all islands. You can die, and Gerry won't. Gerry can die, and you won't. Our lives just go on, separate as they have always been.

I do use husbands a bit (in books). It's what writers of this kind do, actually. I am quite careful to try to keep the family out of my writing. You find, on the whole, that men will forgive you everything if you say they are good in bed and the women if you say they are beautiful. It's the way to turn away wrath.

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.

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

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

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

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.

People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe.

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.

Idle, profligate, ingrate. No one decent could ever want him.

New lives always begin tomorrow, […] Never now.

I don't know what I want but it's not this. I don't want to be this person, I don't want to be trapped in this body, in this house, in this marriage.fay we

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

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

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

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

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.

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

This is my home now. I like it. Nothing happens here. I know what to expect from one day to the next. I can control everything, and I can eat. I like eating.

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.

I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping.

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.

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

Food is the supremest of pleasures.

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.

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

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.

The more you want the more you suffer. If you want everything you must suffere everything.

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.

Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I don't do badly, I don't do well, I just do it.

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

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

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

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

Not satisfied with what he's got? Is that it? That's husbands all over. Ungrateful pigs. You do everything for them, you bring up their kids, you cook their food, you wash their clothes, you warm their beds, you fuss over your face day after day so they'll fancy you, you wear yourself out to keep them happy and at the end of it all, what happens? They find someone else they fancy more. Someone young some man hasn't had the chance to wear out yet. Marriage is a con trick. A girl should marry a rich man, then at least she'd have a fur coat to keep her warm in her old age.

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.

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!

To do good to one is to do bad to another. But you don't need to hear my excuses. They are the same that everyone makes to themselves when faced with the misery of others; though they would like to do the right thing, they simply fail to do so and look after themselves instead.

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

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 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.

If that was dying, I don't want to do it again.

Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would be heaven on earth, and had turned out to be hell, here and now?

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.

We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the destination.

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.

I'd have apple pie. You break through the crust and it's juicy underneath.

I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.

Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed.

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.

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.

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.

Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs.

I need men to define me: to give me an idea of what I am. If I didn't have boyfriends I don't think I would exist. I would fly apart in all directions. So I must live my life in perpetual pain, if I want to live at all.

If anything happiness is a feeling of being essential

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

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.

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.

Loving is upsetting. That's the point of it.

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.

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

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

What happens now is that if some unfortunate man goes to bed with some woman, overnight there's a divorce. He thinks and feels about the authenticity of his being, then they have to get married. So they just end up having serial marriages, which is distressing for the children. It would be much better if people just put up with the guilt of having erred and shut up.

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

Pity me'
the unspoken words upon a nation's lips
'because I am indeed pitiable. I have been deprived of freedom
yes, of course, all that. And of proper food and of fancy things, consumer durables and material wealth of every kind, all that. But mostly I have been robbed of my birthright, my mother, my father, my home. And how can I ever recover from that?' Then there is a murmur, as a last, despairing cry, the latest prayer
'Market forces, market forces.' Say it over and over, as once the Hail Mary was said, to ward off all ills and rescue the soul, but we know in our hearts it won't work. There is no magic here contained. Wasted lives, lost souls, unfixable. Pity me, pity me, pity me.

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

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.

I am not all she devil. A she devil has no memory of the past - she is born afresh every morning. She deals with the feelings of today, not yesterday, and she is free. There is a little bit of me left, still woman.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

You shouldn't keep other people's phallic symbols on the mantelpiece.

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.

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.

When you're with a man, no one tells you he's a creep; they don't like to; they think, well, that's her choice, perhaps ours isn't up to much either; how will we ever be sure, in this polite world? In other words, as we all know, one woman's creep is another's true love, and just as well.

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.

Getting two sentences together is exhilarating. It is heaven.

The language of distinction ceases to be available; is no longer available. We must search CD Rom for meanings which once were clear, but now are obscure. The words are too big for the narrow column of the contemporary newspaper. We are all one-syllable people now, two at most. So we mumble and stumble into our futures. But it is still our task and our reward to scavenge through the universe , picking up the detritus of lost concepts, dusting them down, making them shine. Latin was the best polishing cloth of all, but we threw it away.

Some of us are made fat and some of us are made thin, and that's all there is to it.

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

Are you sure you wouldn't like some toast, Phyllis? Toast is one of the triumphs of our civilisation. It must be made with very fresh bread, thickly cut; then toasted very quickly and buttered at once, so the butter is half-melted. Unsalted butter, of course; you sprinkle it with salt afterwards. Sea salt, preferably.

Worst fears: That God was not good. That the earth you stood upon shifted, and chasms yawned; that people, falling, clutched one another for help and none was forthcoming. That the basis of all things was evil. That the beauty of the evening, now settling in a yellow glow on the stone of The Cottage barns, the swallows dipping and soaring, a sudden host of butterflies in the long grasses in the foreground, was a lie; a deceitful sheen on which hopeful visions flitted momentarily, and that long, long ago evil had won against good, death over life... in the glow of the sun against the stone walls, as well as in the dancing of butterflies- that in this she had been mocked.

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.

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

Truly, 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!

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

I am always concerned when people, finding out that I am a writer, apologise and say, "I'm not much of a reader actually. I know I ought to, but I just don't seem able to find the time," and then go on to tell me how they feel obliged to finish any book they begin. Well, of course, I say, you will be reluctant to open one in the first place, knowing what it might entail. It isn't meant to be like that, I assure them. If you begin a book and you don't like it, just throw it away. Or take it round to a charity shop. It's like going to a party: some people you linger with, knowing you get on. Some people you exchange greeting with and move on fast. It's nothing against them. They're just not your kind of person. It's the same with books. You must be prepared to discard. And though you may feel it's a waste of money not reading a book you don't get on with, that's like not opening the windows when the weather turns warm for fear of wasting the central heating. So, as I say, now is a good point to abandon the book. You have my permission - even my encouragement.