Quotes from Fay Weldon

Food is the supremest of pleasures.

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.

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.

Getting two sentences together is exhilarating. It is heaven.

want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return.

I don't know what I want but it's not this. I don't want to be this person, I don't want to be trapped in this body, in this house, in this marriage.fay we

Are you sure you wouldn't like some toast, Phyllis? Toast is one of the triumphs of our civilisation. It must be made with very fresh bread, thickly cut; then toasted very quickly and buttered at once, so the butter is half-melted. Unsalted butter, of course; you sprinkle it with salt afterwards. Sea salt, preferably.

I just want not to be hurt by him. I want it to be like it was when I was a child, when you thought the day you got married you lived happily ever after.

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

This is my home now. I like it. Nothing happens here. I know what to expect from one day to the next. I can control everything, and I can eat. I like eating.

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.

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.

Women have always tried to make themselves attractive to men, and you're not going to change a thing like that in a hurry. Look around you. All the women nicely groomed and attractive and good-looking, and the men no better than fat slugs, for the most part, or skinny runts. Unshaved and smelly as often as not. They get away with everything, men. They can do every disgusting thing they like and no one ever says a thing.

I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping.

Better to live with the guilty secret than the open truth of their life together - that they were bound by the habit of illicit lust, mutual degradation.

We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the destination.

During the day she would read science fiction novels. In the evenings she watched television. And she ate, and ate, and drank, and ate.

She drank sweet coffee, sweet tea, sweet cocoa and sweet sherry.

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

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

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

Whore,' he cried. Well, she was not his wife, yet she slept with him. She lived in sin. What else but a whore did that make her; and what did her whoredom make of Ben?

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

So treasure your moments of happiness, the glimpses you see of truth, the nights you've been loved. That's all you've got.