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Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
MARGARET DRABBLE, A Summer Bird-Cage
I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
MARGARET DRABBLE, attributed, The Situation of the Novel
I very much wanted to be an actress and in fact I did act for a year, but by then I had my first novel accepted. I was still very keen on the stage but I was losing interest in it because of the children—I had one and was expecting another—and writing was such a convenient career to combine with having a family.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Paris Review, fall/winter 1978
England's not a bad country. It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons.
MARGARET DRABBLE, A Natural Curiosity
Lord 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.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Millstone
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.
MARGARET DRABBLE, attributed, The Writer's Chapbook
I don't see how you can go too far in the right direction.
MARGARET DRABBLE, Jerusalem the Golden
The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Middle Ground
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 DRABBLE, A Summer Bird-Cage
Sex isn't the most important thing in life, she decided, wriggling her body slightly to see if her movement would affect Anthony. It did: he stiffened slightly, but slept on. But if sex isn't the most important thing, what is?
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Ice Age
Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.
MARGARET DRABBLE, A Summer Bird-Cage
Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Radiant Way
Too academic an education can inhibit the workings of the creative mind.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Paris Review, fall/winter 1978
Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Middle Ground
I'm rather a bad interviewer because I never ask people things that they don't want to be asked. As soon as they look annoyed or nervous, I never persist.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Paris Review, fall/winter 1978
I 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 DRABBLE, The Guardian, Jan. 2, 1993
Thrift has nearly killed her on several occasions, through the agency of old sausages, slow-punctured tyres, rusty blades.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Radiant Way
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.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Paris Review, fall/winter 1978
Nothing succeeds, they say, like success, and certainly nothing fails like failure.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Millstone
The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Realms of Gold
The choice of name tends to affect the development of the character, even the plot. This may be so in real life also.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Paris Review, fall/winter 1978
When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
MARGARET DRABBLE, The Middle Ground
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