Fay Weldon Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
My children are ungrateful: they don't care. That is my great reward. They are free.

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

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

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

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

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

Fay Weldon
It's very unfashionable to say this, but rape actually isn't the worst thing that can happen to a woman if you're safe, alive and unmarked after the event.

Fay Weldon
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.

Fay Weldon
I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulation: 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.

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

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

Fay Weldon
And then of course the babies came, and took us by surprise, as babies do. First, how much you love them, second, how much work they are, third, how difficult it is to leave them. We would rather sit and sing to them than get on with running a business.

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

Fay Weldon
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.

Fay Weldon
Both Ron and I went to see our analysts twice a week so really there was no need to speak to each other.

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