Fay Weldon

“Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.”

“Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application - practice. What you practice is what you manifest.”

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

“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”

“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.”

“For who ever lived totally as they wanted to; who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.”

“Men are irrelevant.”

“Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed.”

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

“There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.”

“guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine”

“People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe.”

“We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends.”

“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.”

“The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.”

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

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

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

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