Fay Weldon Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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.

Fay Weldon
Had you never noticed the way the secret world sends our signs and symbols into the ordinary world? It delivers our messages in the form of coincidences: Still, it had been a good marriage as marriages go. And as marriages go, it went.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fay Weldon
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!

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

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

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

Fay Weldon
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
Agree with your accusers, loudly and clearly. They will shut up sooner.

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

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

Fay Weldon
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
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