Fay Weldon quotes:

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

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

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

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

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.

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe.

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.

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.

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

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

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!"

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

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

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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

Food is the supremest of pleasures.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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