Margaret Drabble Quotes

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg.

Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

England's not a bad country? It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post- industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. 286

On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.

World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factories - at all social levels - which they enjoyed very much. A lot of them were quite happy during the war.

And there isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.