Fay Weldon Quotes & Sayings

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

Else to go Felicity sits down upon the steps to consider — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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? — Fay Weldon

There was no such thing as defeat if you didn't accept it. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

A woman's body works as if it knew something she didn't, and does not have her best interests at heart. If you need to look your best it will deliver you a pimple; if you don't want it to, your period will start early; if you want a baby badly your body refuses to give you one; if you are content in your life, lo, you are pregnant. — Fay Weldon

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

Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on. — Fay Weldon

Letters crossing in the post, unfamiliar tunes heard three times in one day, the way that blows of fate descend upon the same bowed shoulders, and the beams of good fortune glow perpetually upon the blessed. Fairy tales, as I said, are lived out daily. There is far more going on in the world than we ever imagine. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

One learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance. — Fay Weldon

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

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

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. — Fay Weldon

I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state? — Fay Weldon

We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends. — Fay Weldon

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

Pride is what you can afford or think you can afford. — Fay Weldon

People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe. — Fay Weldon

Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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

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

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound. — Fay Weldon

When today's young woman says she isn't a feminist what she means is she isn't a lesbian and she doesn't hate men, she likes to wear make-up and she enjoys a laugh. In which she is no different from many an early feminist. — Fay Weldon

Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs. — Fay Weldon

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people. — Fay Weldon

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine — Fay Weldon

Memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time. — Fay Weldon

By and large, nothing is as bad as you fear, or as good as you hope. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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

Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

One friend dies and we remain indifferent; another dies, perhaps less intimate, and we see ourselves as dead, and weep, mourn, tear our hair or find ourselves caught up in the madness of the wake, competing with others as to who was closest, now suffers most. — Fay Weldon

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

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? — Fay Weldon

The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies. — Fay Weldon

Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens. — Fay Weldon

My experience of men in cars has always been that if you don't want them to do something, they will. It is when they are behind a wheel that they most fear the control of women and children. — Fay Weldon

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

Because clearly the most amazing thing had happened: by some chance - no, the lover does not believe in chance, but destiny - destiny had arranged it so that the man and woman who had made the original whole, then somehow divided and separated by an angry God, had met up again, and now must reform the rightful, righteous whole. At once! — Fay Weldon

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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

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. — Fay Weldon

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

She drank sweet coffee, sweet tea, sweet cocoa and sweet sherry. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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

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

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

Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless ... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it. — Fay Weldon

Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion. — Fay Weldon

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

I like the dry-cleaners. I like the sense of refreshment and renewal. I like the way dirty old torn clothes are dumped, to be returned clean and wholesome in their slippery transparent cases. Better than confesssion any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth, redemption, salvation. — Fay Weldon

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning ... — Fay Weldon

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? — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

Getting two sentences together is exhilarating. It is heaven. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually — Fay Weldon

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

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! — Fay Weldon

Men are irrelevant. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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

Another thing that seems quite helpful to the creative process is having babies. It does not detract at all from one's creativity. It reminds one that there is always more where that came from and there is never any shortage of ideas or of the ability to create. The process of being pregnant and then of having the baby and getting up in the night only puts one more in touch with this fecund part of one's self. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

Loving is upsetting. That's the point of it. — Fay Weldon

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! — Fay Weldon

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

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. — Fay Weldon

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

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

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

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

Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would. — Fay Weldon

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

The more you want the more you suffer. If you want everything you must suffere everything. — Fay Weldon

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. — Fay Weldon

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

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. — Fay Weldon

Food is the supremest of pleasures. — Fay Weldon

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

I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes. — Fay Weldon