Fay Weldon Quotes - Page 2

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.

Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

To the happy all things come: happiness can even bring the dead back to life. It is our resentments, our dreariness, our hate and envy, unrecognized by us, which keeps us miserable. Yet these things are in our heads, not out of our hands; we own them. We can throw them out if we choose.

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

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

I learned that sex was not a question of victory or defeat, of pleasure or profit: of a hand's manipulation and a physical response: I learned that in its purest pleasure it belongs to neither of those who practise it, in the same way as a child belongs to neither parent: it is a free spirit: it simply exists.

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

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

by and large, nothing is as bad as you fear, or as good as you hope.

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.

I know truth is more like a mountain that has to be scaled. The peak of the mountain pierces the clouds and can only rarely be seen, and has never been reached. And what you see of it, moreover, depends upon the flank of the mountain you stand upon, and how exhausted getting even so far has made you. Virtue lies in looking upwards, toiling upwards, and sometimes joyously leaping from one precarious crag of fact and feeling to the next.

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.

If infinity is as they describe it, all things are not just possible but in the end certain.

Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.

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

Prudence says one thing, desire says another, and I'd rather go with desire any time.

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.

She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.

The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.

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

I was always furious because you couldn't take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o'clock. The library didn't shut till half past, but you couldn't change the books till the next day.

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

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