Quotes from Fay Weldon

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

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

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

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

People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe.

I am an ordinary person but carried to extremes.

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

one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs.

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

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

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

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

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.

One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits.

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

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.

Loving is upsetting. That's the point of it.

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!

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.

If anything happiness is a feeling of being essential

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

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.