Mary Wesley Quotes

Rebecca is an example of how not to manage men. The rules of the game never change, it requires subtlety.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

a quick dip in bed with someone you liked but were not in love with

Looking back, I understand that I was teaching myself to write.

I don't write for any particular kind of person.

You know what it's like to persuade a pigheaded child to do something they don't want to. If they hear the same suggestion from someone else, they'll go right off and do it.

I never really know the title of a book until it's finished.

Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

That image of the countryside being a threatening place still exists. People continue to resist the challenge of learning about aspects of life they don't understand.

I found out only recently that we were making an index of enemy code signs.

Unimaginative people are spared quite a lot. They're often much happier, because they don't go through all the variety of conceptions of the person they love.

I always read that men don't like intelligent girls, but I've always found the reverse.

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

We all lie to each other, present some sort of front.

My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.

It seemed sensible to move to a market town where I could walk everywhere.

I have a garden, and I'm passionately interested in young people.

It was pretty awful for us children because we never really knew the local children. Mother was keen for us to learn languages, so our travels took us to France and Italy, as well as the West Country.

Women's courage is rather different from men's. The fact that women have to bring up children and look after husbands makes them braver at facing long-term issues, such as illness. Men are more immediately courageous. Lots of people are brave in battle.

Twenty years ago, I was living in a lovely cottage on the edge of Dartmoor but I couldn't afford to run a car.