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.
Margaret DrabbleIf I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
Margaret DrabbleSome of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition, but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and told the stories from the other point of view.
Margaret DrabbleWhat 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.
Margaret DrabbleThere 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.
Margaret DrabblePerhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
Margaret DrabbleWorld War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factories - at all social levels - which they enjoyed very much. A lot of them were quite happy during the war.
Margaret DrabbleI need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
Margaret DrabblePoverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
Margaret DrabbleThe women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.
Margaret DrabbleLord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember. ... By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly, we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget.
Margaret DrabbleNothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.
Margaret DrabbleAuntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.
Margaret DrabbleI've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
Margaret DrabbleI used to be a reasonably careless and adventurous person before I had children; now I am morbidly obsessed by seat-belts and constantly afraid that low-flying aircraft will drop on my children's school.
Margaret DrabbleMy anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.
Margaret DrabbleBecause 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.
Margaret DrabbleSometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
Margaret DrabbleYou 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.
Margaret DrabbleHow extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.
Margaret DrabbleAnd there isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.
Margaret DrabbleNovels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.
Margaret DrabbleI confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg.
Margaret DrabbleFamily life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.
Margaret DrabbleThere are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.
Margaret Drabble