FAY WELDON

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Men are irrelevant.

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

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

People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe.

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

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

No one should be allowed to give back the gift of life, unless they are very old and full of tears, when the body outlives the spirit, when they should be allowed to join the others who've already gone.

My experience of men in cars has always been that if you don't want them to do something, they will. It is when they are behind a wheel that they most fear the control of women and children.

Because one cause is bad does not make the opposing cause good.

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.

I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.

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

Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.

Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

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

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

It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.