Quotes from Margaret Drabble

On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

I actually remember feeling delight at two o'clock in the morning when the baby woke for his feed because I so longed to have another look at him.

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...

Lucky in work, unlucky in love.

I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.

I don't see how you can go too far, in the right direction

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

Happiness is for those who can live in a warm climate.

Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assesment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie.

Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.

Before Octavia was born, I used to think that love bore some relation to merit and to beauty, but now I saw that this was not so.

I actually remember feeling delight, at two o'clock in the morning, when the baby woke for his feed, because I so longed to have another look at him.

Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable... Why prove that it had ever once been green?