17 Fay Weldon Quotes

Fay Weldon quotes

1. Go to work on an egg.

2. 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.

3. The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself:They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.

4. 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.

5. 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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

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

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

7. 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.

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

9. 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.

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

11. 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.

12. 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.