Margaret Forster Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

I don't like taking from anyone. I'd rather be a giver, though not for any worthy reason. It's about control, obviously. If I give, I control; if I take, I am controlled. If someone offers me something for free I am at once suspicious.

Margaret Forster
My first novel, Dame's Delight, was published in 1964, followed a year later by Georgy Girl. It was so easy to get published in the Sixties. Publishers won't take risks on first novelists now, but then they expected to lose money on your first two or three books. Margaret Drabble and Sheila MacLeod were my exact contemporaries.

Margaret Forster
I'm not unique. I'm only unusual in the media world — the London world. Babies are tough to look after, and I look back on those early years as a complete nightmare and think, how on earth did I do it? But as to why I did it without help: I couldn't bear the employer/servant relationship and dreaded having to share my privacy.

Margaret Forster
I love being in charge of my own house. I love decorating it, looking after it — I wouldn't move, though it's just an ordinary house. This is where my roots are. The children have literally been born here, we've dug into the neighbourhood, and I need that stability.

Margaret Forster
My husband and children are precious to me, but then so is my work.

Margaret Forster
She smiled slightly as she continued to gaze at the passing scene: she was being a snob and delighting in it.

Margaret Forster
The strain and stress of 'having it all' is colossal, though I do think women should have it all. But personally I couldn't have coped.

Margaret Forster
But that perhaps is the point of any memoir—to walk with the dead and yet see them with our eyes, from our vantage point.

Margaret Forster