Fay Weldon Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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
There seems to be a general overall pattern in most lives, that nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden everything happens.

Fay Weldon
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.

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

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

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

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

Fay Weldon
That to be good is to be happy is not something particularly evident in any of our experiences of real life, yet how badly we want it, and need it, to be true.

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

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

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

Fay Weldon
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
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
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
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 confession any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth, redemption, salvation.

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

Fay Weldon
Your generation does too much sharing. To share grief is to double grief, not halve it.

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

Fay Weldon
Push, rend, slither, pop, baby's here. Baby cries.

Fay Weldon
This is an attempt to narrate a real life, my own, and to find the pattern within it. The pattern can't really be completed, of course, until death, when autobiography so rudely turns into biography.

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

Fay Weldon
Who cares about half a second after the big bang; what about the half second before?

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

Fay Weldon