Fay Weldon Quotes

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

Never defend yourself; agree with your critics, it takes the wind out of their sails.

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

Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.

Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.

Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application - practice. What you practice is what you manifest.

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

Truly Alice, 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! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.

Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.

Preserve your peace of mind. There is not much time; all things end in death. Do not lament the past too much, or fear the future too acutely, ot waste too much energy on other peoples' woes, in case the present dissolves altogether.

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

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

I didn't even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books.

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.

Marriage is a very difficult relationship for nearly everyone and I'm sure you shouldn't do it if you want a quiet little easy life.

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

So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.

A woman has all too much substance in a man's eyes at the best of times. That is why men like women to be slim. Her lack of flesh negates her. The less of her there is, the less notice he need take of her. The more like a male she appears to be, the safer he feels.

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?

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

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

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

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

If I am a prolific writer and turn my hand, with what seems to some as indecent haste, from novels to screenplays to stage and radio plays, it is because there is so much to be said, so few of us to say it, and time runs out.

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