Fay Weldon
Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Women
There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.Collection: Age
Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.
No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction.
The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe.
The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.
Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application - practice. What you practice is what you manifest.
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.
Men are irrelevant.
If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.Collection: Inspirational
I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.Collection: Cynical
Never defend yourself; agree with your critics, it takes the wind out of their sails.Collection: Wind
Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.Collection: Understanding
People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Book
The prophets of doom, in my experience, are generally ignored and usually right.Collection: Ignored
A 'weakness,' I now realize, is nothing but a strength not properly developed.Collection: Weakness
Marriage is what happens when one at least of the partners doesn't want the other to get away.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Past
So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.Collection: Baby
I didn't even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Want
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?Collection: Clothes
Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.Collection: Writing
guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wineCollection: Wine
One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits.Collection: Definitions
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.Collection: Running
How has anyone ever understood anyone, except through love, which is wordless?Collection: Understood
One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Loneliness
Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Happiness
one tends to suspect others of what one is guilty of oneself. The unfaithful wife is quick to suspect the husband of infidelity.Collection: Husband
One can learn, at least. One can go on learning until the day one is cut off.Collection: Learning
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.Collection: Sex
Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.Collection: Ambition
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.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Sex
If infinity is as they describe it, all things are not just possible but in the end certain.Collection: Infinity
Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.Collection: Confidence
Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.Collection: Fiction
Prudence says one thing, desire says another, and I'd rather go with desire any time.Collection: Desire