Quotes from Fay Weldon

for a man functions best if he ventures out into the world from a domestic setting in which his restless sexual and procreative energies are given liberty.

But as for the rest of you, sisters, when anyone says to you, this, that or the other is natural, then fight. Nature does not know best; for the birds, for the bees, for the cows; for men, perhaps. But your interests and Nature's do not coincide. Nature our Friend is an argument used, quite understandably, by men.

Up there on Olympus, where he'd been raised, where the mountain of reason pierces the sky of the intellect, the talk was all of how the soul suffered if the senses were gratified. Polly Patch would not allow it. She claimed, as the Devil would, that the senses and the soul were one: that gratifying one was to gratify the other.

Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would be heaven on earth, and had turned out to be hell, here and now?

Why do you write? Because I want to persuade everybody to agree with me about everything, for their own good.

Mary Fisher has built her tower around her, and cemented the stone with banknotes, and lined the walls inside with stolen love, but still she is not safe. She has a mother.

Research says that 80 per cent of all submitted manuscripts are rejected, and I have no reason to doubt it. But ask yourself exactly what category (or categories) yours may have fallen into – what pigeonhole.

You must read, Alice, before it's too late. You must fill your mind with the invented images of the past: the more the better.

Writers create Houses of the Imagination, from whose doors the generations greet each other.

Lust corrodes as love does not. Lust is all hard hammer blows, cracking and splitting. Love is a slippery, velvety cloak to hide in. Lust is real and love is the stuff of dreams, and dreams are what we are made of. A million million women couldn't be wrong. Could they?

Novels do not drop ready written from the skies. Your couple of hours' reading is my half year's work.

Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth; left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.

How has anyone ever understood anyone, except through love, which is wordless?

Men are irrelevant.

No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction.

Marriage is a very difficult relationship for nearly everyone and I'm sure you shouldn't do it if you want a quiet little easy life.

People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

Marriage is what happens when one at least of the partners doesn't want the other to get away.

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

There was no such thing as defeat if you didn't accept it.

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

Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.

Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her.

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