Fay Weldon Quotes

Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs.

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

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

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

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

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

It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable.

Loving is upsetting. That's the point of it.

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.

Absolutely,' she said. 'The more you pay attention to the body, the less attention you've got left to pay the soul. I really do understand that.

Truly, 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!

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.

If anything happiness is a feeling of being essential

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

It became obvious that you had to be a feminist because it was such a ridiculous state of affairs.

My troubles are not outside me,' said Esther, 'they are inside me. Those are the worst troubles of all.

I think it's important to go (to church every Sunday) and sit and think about something other than yourself, pray for the sick, consider the dead.

The more you want the more you suffer. If you want everything you must suffer everything.

There is nothing, she would think, more delicious that the icing of bought chocolate cake, eaten in the silence and privacy of the night.

Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person: after you have children you understand how wars start.

To do good to one is to do bad to another. But you don't need to hear my excuses. They are the same that everyone makes to themselves when faced with the misery of others; though they would like to do the right thing, they simply fail to do so and look after themselves instead.

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.

You don't go to church for intellectual gratification - you go because it pleases your aesthetic sensibilities.

If that was dying, I don't want to do it again.

New lives always begin tomorrow, […] Never now.

want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return.

Getting two sentences together is exhilarating. It is heaven.

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

Some of us are made fat and some of us are made thin, and that's all there is to it.

Food is the supremest of pleasures.

I don't know what I want but it's not this. I don't want to be this person, I don't want to be trapped in this body, in this house, in this marriage.fay we

Peel away the wife, the mother, find the woman within, and there the she devil is.

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

Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth; Left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide. ~Fay Weldon

And so another season passed, and I hadn’t seen Brian, yet another terrible tangle with Peter went by, and anyone who loved me I avoided like the plague. Can things get worse? I kept wondering, and surprisingly, they did. Until finally I read this book by Fay Weldon, and she talks about a woman married to a depressed man and explains there’s nothing you (i.e., women) can do about them. And fiction got through to me where facts had feared to tread.

When you're with a man, no one tells you he's a creep; they don't like to; they think, well, that's her choice, perhaps ours isn't up to much either; how will we ever be sure, in this polite world? In other words, as we all know, one woman's creep is another's true love, and just as well.

Better to live with the guilty secret than the open truth of their life together - that they were bound by the habit of illicit lust, mutual degradation.

I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping.

Do not despair, little Alice. Only persist, and thou shalt see, Jane Austen's all in all to thee.

I just want not to be hurt by him. I want it to be like it was when I was a child, when you thought the day you got married you lived happily ever after.

This is my home now. I like it. Nothing happens here. I know what to expect from one day to the next. I can control everything, and I can eat. I like eating.

The insistence that somehow women are an endangered species that needs to be protected at all costs seems to me to be contrary to what's desirable for their view of themselves. And it just invests far more power in the male than is necessary.

Not satisfied with what he's got? Is that it? That's husbands all over. Ungrateful pigs. You do everything for them, you bring up their kids, you cook their food, you wash their clothes, you warm their beds, you fuss over your face day after day so they'll fancy you, you wear yourself out to keep them happy and at the end of it all, what happens? They find someone else they fancy more. Someone young some man hasn't had the chance to wear out yet. Marriage is a con trick. A girl should marry a rich man, then at least she'd have a fur coat to keep her warm in her old age.

We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the destination.

It seemed to me when I wrote The Life and Loves of a She-Devil that women were so much in the habit of being good it would do nobody any harm if they learned to be a little bad - that is to say, burn down their houses, give away their children, put their husband in prison, steal his money and turn themselves into their husband's mistress.

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually

Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies.

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

As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women.

Whore,' he cried. Well, she was not his wife, yet she slept with him. She lived in sin. What else but a whore did that make her; and what did her whoredom make of Ben?

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

During the day she would read science fiction novels. In the evenings she watched television. And she ate, and ate, and drank, and ate.

She drank sweet coffee, sweet tea, sweet cocoa and sweet sherry.

Because lurking somewhere beneath the surface of your brain is a vision of loneliness, and it will be a terrible moment when it breaks through, and you realise that your future is not a green pastures, but the knackers yard. We are all separate people, and we are all alone. It is a ridiculous thing to say that no man is an island. We are all islands. You can die, and Gerry won't. Gerry can die, and you won't. Our lives just go on, separate as they have always been.

the observation made by novelist Fay Weldon: “The greatest advantage of not having children must be that you can go on believing you are a nice person. Once you have children, you understand how wars start.

I do use husbands a bit (in books). It's what writers of this kind do, actually. I am quite careful to try to keep the family out of my writing. You find, on the whole, that men will forgive you everything if you say they are good in bed and the women if you say they are beautiful. It's the way to turn away wrath.

Are you sure you wouldn't like some toast, Phyllis? Toast is one of the triumphs of our civilisation. It must be made with very fresh bread, thickly cut; then toasted very quickly and buttered at once, so the butter is half-melted. Unsalted butter, of course; you sprinkle it with salt afterwards. Sea salt, preferably.

Worst fears: That God was not good. That the earth you stood upon shifted, and chasms yawned; that people, falling, clutched one another for help and none was forthcoming. That the basis of all things was evil. That the beauty of the evening, now settling in a yellow glow on the stone of The Cottage barns, the swallows dipping and soaring, a sudden host of butterflies in the long grasses in the foreground, was a lie; a deceitful sheen on which hopeful visions flitted momentarily, and that long, long ago evil had won against good, death over life... in the glow of the sun against the stone walls, as well as in the dancing of butterflies- that in this she had been mocked.

What happens now is that if some unfortunate man goes to bed with some woman, overnight there's a divorce. He thinks and feels about the authenticity of his being, then they have to get married. So they just end up having serial marriages, which is distressing for the children. It would be much better if people just put up with the guilt of having erred and shut up.

Winnicott, I think, would have enjoyed the observation made by novelist Fay Weldon: “The greatest advantage of not having children must be that you can go on believing you are a nice person. Once you have children, you understand how wars start.” All relationships,

Women have always tried to make themselves attractive to men, and you're not going to change a thing like that in a hurry. Look around you. All the women nicely groomed and attractive and good-looking, and the men no better than fat slugs, for the most part, or skinny runts. Unshaved and smelly as often as not. They get away with everything, men. They can do every disgusting thing they like and no one ever says a thing.

Idle, profligate, ingrate. No one decent could ever want him.

For who ever lived totally as they wanted to; who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.

I'd have apple pie. You break through the crust and it's juicy underneath.

We discuss things, rather than ideas; we exchange information, not theories; we keep ourselves steady by thinking about the particular. The general is frightening.

If you love the father of your child you feel he has given enough. If you don't love him all you want is his money.

The language of distinction ceases to be available; is no longer available. We must search CD Rom for meanings which once were clear, but now are obscure. The words are too big for the narrow column of the contemporary newspaper. We are all one-syllable people now, two at most. So we mumble and stumble into our futures. But it is still our task and our reward to scavenge through the universe , picking up the detritus of lost concepts, dusting them down, making them shine. Latin was the best polishing cloth of all, but we threw it away.

I am not all she devil. A she devil has no memory of the past - she is born afresh every morning. She deals with the feelings of today, not yesterday, and she is free. There is a little bit of me left, still woman.

Ruby once told Margaret that Ben was an accident, but it wasn't true. The house just felt empty without a baby in it. Good God, why do women have such feelings: and worse, having them, why do they then act upon them?

She described how Camus’s aphorism “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” helps her fight back against unproductive feelings of meaninglessness. If we consider, like Camus, Sisyphus at the foot of his mountain, we can see that he is smiling. He is content in his task of defying the Gods, the journey more important than the goal. To achieve a beginning, a middle, an end, a meaning to the chaos of creation—that's more than any deity seems to manage: But it's what writers do. So I tidy the desk, even polish it up a bit, stick some flowers in a vase and start. As I begin a novel I remind myself as ever of Camus's admonition that the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. And even while thinking, well, fat chance! I find courage, reach for the heights, and if the rock keeps rolling down again so it does. What the hell, start again. Rewrite. Be of good cheer. Smile on, Sisyphus!

Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I don't do badly, I don't do well, I just do it.

I am always concerned when people, finding out that I am a writer, apologise and say, “I’m not much of a reader actually. I know I ought to, but I just don’t seem able to find the time,” and then go on to tell me how they feel obliged to finish any book they begin. Well, of course, I say, you will be reluctant to open one in the first place, knowing what it might entail. It isn’t meant to be like that, I assure them. If you begin a book and you don’t like it, just throw it away. Or take it round to a charity shop. It’s like going to a party: some people you linger with, knowing you get on. Some people you exchange greeting with and move on fast. It’s nothing against them. They’re just not your kind of person. It’s the same with books. You must be prepared to discard. And though you may feel it’s a waste of money not reading a book you don’t get on with, that’s like not opening the windows when the weather turns warm for fear of wasting the central heating. So, as I say, now is a good point to abandon the book. You have my permission - even my encouragement.

Of course men can’t know you when you’re unclean,’ said Hilda. ‘It says so in the Bible. That’s why it’s called the curse. It’s God’s punishment.’ ‘For what?’ ‘Giving Adam the apple, I suppose.’ ‘He didn’t have to eat it.’ ‘Yes he did. If someone offers you food, it’s only manners to take it. Why are you always so argumentative?

What would the world be like if women stopped being women—shut the tea-and-sympathy shop, closed down the love store, gave up the slave religion? Could the world go on without romantic love, all iron fist, no velvet glove? The Germans thought Nietzsche was great, and look what it got them. And yet, in the end, nobody loves a victim, even—especially—the other victims. “Down among the women,” as Fay Weldon wrote, back when she still was one. “What a place to be!” Now she writes books telling women to fake orgasms because nature has designed them to hardly ever have them and why make a man feel bad about something that isn’t his fault? In other words, practice the slave religion; just don’t believe in it yourself. But why would anyone do that if they can buy their own shoes?

PRAXIS DUVEEN, AT THE age of five, sitting on the beach at Brighton, made a pretty picture for the photographer. Round angel face, yellow curls, puffed sleeves, white socks and little white shoes—one on, one off, while she tried to take a pebble from between her tiny pink toes—delightful! The photographer had hoped to include her elder sister Hypatia in the picture, but that sullen, sallow little girl had refused to appear on the same piece of card as her ill-shod sister.

Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed.

I know more than he does, she thinks, in this mad excess of arrogance. I may work in an advertising agency. I may prefer central heating to carrying coals, and a frozen pizza to a fresh mackerel, but I grant the world its dignity. I am aware of what I don't know, don't understand, and that's more than you can do. My body moves with the tides, bleeds with the moon, burns in the sun: I, Minette, I am a poor passing fragment of humanity: I obey laws that I only dimly understand, but I aware that the penalty of defying them is at best disaster, at worst death. ("The Man With No Eyes")

Pity me'--the unspoken words upon a nation's lips--'because I am indeed pitiable. I have been deprived of freedom--yes, of course, all that. And of proper food and of fancy things, consumer durables and material wealth of every kind, all that. But mostly I have been robbed of my birthright, my mother, my father, my home. And how can I ever recover from that?' Then there is a murmur, as a last, despairing cry, the latest prayer--'Market forces, market forces.' Say it over and over, as once the Hail Mary was said, to ward off all ills and rescue the soul, but we know in our hearts it won't work. There is no magic here contained. Wasted lives, lost souls, unfixable. Pity me, pity me, pity me.

Frigid bitch,' he seizes her hair, pulls back her head. He is strong: she is helpless: if he wishes to rape her, he could, he would. It is in the air. The little girls fall quiet: terror silences them. Ben makes love to Lucy, these days, with hatred, not with love. The love he feels for her (and he does) weakens him, softens him, makes him impotent. He feels it. She is far from frigid: she is ashamed of her response to his violence: frightened of being out of her own control - if she not a mother? And mothers must be on duty day and night.

Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would be heaven on earth, and had turned out to be hell, here and now?

else to go Felicity sits down upon the steps to consider

I need men to define me: to give me an idea of what I am. If I didn't have boyfriends I don't think I would exist. I would fly apart in all directions. So I must live my life in perpetual pain, if I want to live at all.

Grief is a lovely word and a lovely thing. It heals, as resentment cannot. Grief must be admitted and lived through, or it turns into resentment, and continues to bother you for the rest of your life, rearing its depressed little head at all the wrong moments, so that one Sunday tea time at the old lady's home you will unexpectedly begin to cry into your toasted teacake, and the nurses will say "Poor Mrs. Frazer, that's the end," and will move you into the senile ward, when the truth of the matter is quite different. It's not senility, but grief grown uncheckable with age. Myself, I cry now and eat now, so as not to cry later, when it is yet more dangerous. I shall make a very cheerful old lady.

You shouldn't keep other people's phallic symbols on the mantelpiece.

You must read, Alice, before it's too late. You must fill your mind with the invented images of the past: the more the better.

Writers create Houses of the Imagination, from whose doors the generations greet each other.

Novels do not drop ready written from the skies. Your couple of hours' reading is my half year's work.

Her feminism is still only skin deep, an academic study. History, now fashionably related in the present tense, has deprived the past of its reality.

Research says that 80 per cent of all submitted manuscripts are rejected, and I have no reason to doubt it. But ask yourself exactly what category (or categories) yours may have fallen into – what pigeonhole.

Lust corrodes as love does not. Lust is all hard hammer blows, cracking and splitting. Love is a slippery, velvety cloak to hide in. Lust is real and love is the stuff of dreams, and dreams are what we are made of. A million million women couldn't be wrong. Could they?

A brave little woman,’ said the vicar. ‘So many of our women are now left alone.’ And so they were. Those who in peacetime were expected to need male protection, in wartime were assumed to be able to manage perfectly well. And so they did.

Guilt is to the soul as pain is to the body, a warning that harm is being done.

But as for the rest of you, sisters, when anyone says to you, this, that or the other is natural, then fight. Nature does not know best; for the birds, for the bees, for the cows; for men, perhaps. But your interests and Nature’s do not coincide. Nature our Friend is an argument used, quite understandably, by men.

Mary Fisher has built her tower around her, and cemented the stone with banknotes, and lined the walls inside with stolen love, but still she is not safe. She has a mother.

Why do you write? Because I want to persuade everybody to agree with me about everything, for their own good.

even as she says it, sees love drain out of his eyes: and somehow, as a stream, which seeks its own level, it flows over into hers, and her fate is sealed. The less he loves, the more she will.

for a man functions best if he ventures out into the world from a domestic setting in which his restless sexual and procreative energies are given liberty.

Up there on Olympus, where he’d been raised, where the mountain of reason pierces the sky of the intellect, the talk was all of how the soul suffered if the senses were gratified. Polly Patch would not allow it. She claimed, as the Devil would, that the senses and the soul were one: that gratifying one was to gratify the other.

As a young woman I, Frances, did not have Serena's appetite for work. I never quite accepted employment as an essential part in my life.

Serena and I would reassure our mother in our later years — see, you did the right thing, we turned out okay — but she never quite believed us.