Fay Weldon

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

“Go to work on an egg.”

“Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.”

“The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself…They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.”

“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.”

“Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on.”

“I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?”

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

“I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state?”

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