Quotes from Maeve Binchy

Growing up in Ireland, there never seemed to be the notion that children should be seen and not heard. We all looked forward to mealtimes when we'd sit around the table and talk about our days. Storytelling and long, rambling conversations were considered good things.

We are all the heroes and heroines of our own lives. Our love stories are amazingly romantic; our losses and betrayals and disappointments are gigantic in our own minds.

I didn't get excited by weight loss, and since I was already happy being fat, I couldn't see the point of it all. I'm 6 ft. and weigh about 18 st. or 19 st., but weighing myself is not something I do with much pleasure.

We have to make our own happiness, and we have to make our own decisions and play the hand that is dealt to us.

An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.

When I was teaching Latin in girls' schools before I became a writer, I didn't much like it if parents would come in and say, 'We'll have less of the Ovid and Virgil and more of the grammar, please.' After all, I was the one in charge. That's how I feel about doctors. You should trust them to do their job properly.

Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life.

I have always believed that life is too short for rows and disagreements. Even if I think I'm right, I would prefer to apologize and remain friends rather than win and be an enemy.

If I see Marian Keyes' books or Patricia Scanlan's books given more prominence than mine in the bookstore, I'll move mine to the front. I've told them I do this, and they've confessed to doing the same thing to me.

I was fat, and that was awful because when you're young and sensitive, you think the world is over because you're fat.

My mother hoped I would meet a nice doctor or barrister or accountant who would marry me and take me to live in what is now called Fashionable Dublin Four. But she felt that this was a vain hope. I was a bit loud to make a nice professional wife, and anyway, I was too keen on spending my holidays in far flung places to meet any of these people.

I've had a good life, full of more success and happiness than I ever expected.

I once got a huge, expensive flower arrangement from a person I didn't like, who sent it out of pure guilt. It had a hideous bird-of-paradise in the middle, and I thought it would never fade and die. I hated it.

My family life reads a bit like 'Little House on the Prairie.' I was big sister to Joan, Renee, and brother William, and we grew up in Dalkey, a little town 10 miles outside of Dublin. It was a secure, safe and happy childhood, which was meant to be a disadvantage when it comes to writing stories about family dramas.

I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your garden when you can't get out.

I didn't have a sweet tooth, but I liked butter, and I liked sauces, and I liked wine... and curry... and cheeses.

I couldn't have children, so that's the bad side. But compared to everything else I have, it's not all that terribly bad. I count my winners rather than my losers.

Nobody ever wins by the cavalry coming to rescue you. It isn't a question of you're happy if you get married, or you get thin, or you get rich, because I've known lots of thin, rich, married people who are absolutely miserable.

A silly idea about a book of blessings couldn't really work. Not seriously.

He had not known it was possible to love a little human being as he loved Annie.

Eve showed Aidan how to rake the range. "I think when we're married we might have something more modern," he grumbled. "No, surely with the eight children we can have them stoking it, going up the chimney even.

Problems don't solve themselves neatly like that, due to a set of coincidences. Problems are solved by making decisions. Erika had always said that, and he had thought she was being doctrinaire. But it was true. Deciding not to change anything was a decision in itself. He hadn't fully understood this before.

Her life was like her house—a colorful fantasy where anything was possible if you wanted it badly enough.

There were women who fussed about their homes as if they thought life were a permanent examination where they would be found wanting.