Quotes from Beryl Bainbridge

I've never been put down by a man, unless I deserved it, and have never felt inferior.

I've never been drawn to the feminist movement. I was brought up to believe that men had little to do with the home or children - except to bring in the money.

It seems to me that a mutually beneficial relationship between a man and woman requires the man to be dominant. A sensible woman will allow the man to think he is the most important partner.

Being constantly with children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.

nothing is so sad as the injustices of old age.

When I got a telly we had no aerial, but I discovered that if I or one of the children stood by it you could get a picture. So I had to make a statue that could stand by the telly.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course - the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

A man is two people, himself and his cock. A man always takes his friend to the party. Of the two, the friend is the nicer, being more able to show his feelings.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

Some people find it comfortable to go through life on their knees, and good luck to them, but I prefer to keep my spine in the position nature intended.

I don't know why everybody doesn't write because everybody talks.

There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course - the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled

I've never been drawn to the feminist movement. I've never been put down by a man, unless I deserved it, and have never felt inferior.

A man bears the weight of his own body without knowing it, but he soon feels the weight of any other object. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget- but not himself.

he raised his eyes above the black shapes of the trees and saw a small moon, the colour of a lemon, dragged by clouds across the sky. Moons, he thought, were so that men like himself would know they lived here on earth.

It wasn't all misery. On one of our halts we lay spreadeagled on the ice and stared up at a sky blazing with the glory of the most wonderful aurora I'd ever witnessed. I groaned beneath the splendour of those silken curtains, yellow, green, and orange, billowing at the window of the heavens.

At night when they prepared for bed Freda removed all her clothes and lay like a great fretful baby, majestically dimpled and curved. Brenda wore her pajamas and her underwear and a tweed coat—that was the difference between them.

Mrs MacFarley called the valley the Glen. She called the light at early evening the gloaming. She liked to go Roaming in the Gloaming in the Glen.

I left him and went up on deck to look out at the slithering city, its glitter of street lamps fizzy under the rain. There's something wrong about a ship in dock, something pathetic, like a bird fluttering in a spill of oil. The Nova was tethered to her berth by ropes and chains, caught in a pool of greasy water. I could feel her shifting under my feet, tugging to be free.