Fay Weldon Quotes

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

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

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

Because one cause is bad does not make the opposing cause good.

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

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

Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much.

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

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

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.

Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her.

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

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

one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.

If you put a woman in a man's position, she will be more efficient, but no more kind.

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

So treasure your moments of happiness, the glimpses you see of truth, the nights you've been loved. That's all you've got.

Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.

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

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face the friends the health and the children you have earned.

If you put a woman in a man's position she will be more efficient but no more kind.

I am an ordinary person but carried to extremes.

Worry less about what other people think about you and more about what you think about them.

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.