Fay Weldon

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

“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!”

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

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

“Getting two sentences together is exhilarating. It is heaven.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force ofdefinition translate tendencies into habits.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine”