Short Story Writers From England

"And loveliest sight of all, in front of the fire, stretched at full length, was his tiger – and on him – also at full length – reclined the lady, garbed in some strange clinging garment of heavy purple crepe, its hem embroidered with gold, one white arm resting on the beast's head, her back supported by a pile of the velvet cushions, and a heap of rarely bound books at her side, while between her red lips was a rose not redder than they – an almost scarlet rose."

"Would you like to sin With Elinor Glyn On a tiger skin? Or would you prefer To err With her On some other fur?"

"I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like It were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading Henry James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down."

"Would you please publish the enclosed manuscript or return it without delay, as I have other irons in the fire."

"To have "It", the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others. There must be physical attraction, but beauty is unnecessary."

"He had that nameless charm, with a strong magnetism which can only be called "It", and cats – as well as women – always knew when he came into the room."

"No matter what he does, one always forgives him. It does not depend upon looks, either – although this actual person is abominably good-looking – it does not depend upon intelligence or character or – anything – as you say, it is just "it"."

"Prudent readers will do well to hold Three Weeks at arm's length, unless they want to be cut by flying adjectives."

"A madness of tender caressing seized her. She purred as a tiger might have done, while she undulated like a snake."

"Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted."

"Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear."

"When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled…It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase."

"Regarding Salman Rushdie, the official reason given was that speaking up for the rights of a writer to free expression would offend some of our members and Fellows and that the RSL is not a political body [...] This attitude produces the odd situation that one of the few places in the UK where a writer can’t express their views is their own Society."

"The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days."

"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."

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

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

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

"[Published shortly after Weldon died in January 2023] Twenty years ago, I was dispatched to interview Weldon at home in Hampstead, north London. Her then husband, Nick, answered the door and immediately began a brutal interrogation. My name sounded familiar. Hadn't I given Fay's novel The Bulgari Connection, a book controversially sponsored by the Italian jeweller, a stinking review? Uh oh. But I wasn’t about to confess: I had a job to do. Was it definitely me he was thinking of? And was the review really a stinker? Maybe marital loyalty had made it seem worse than it was. The interview began. Fay and I were getting along just fine when the door burst open. In strode her husband, in his hand a copy of the dreaded review, extracts from which he proceeded to read aloud as my entire body turned crimson (though I have to admit – icy chip and all that – I was also thinking what a good anecdote this would make later). As for Fay, a woman who understood revenge, she was enjoying herself mightily. "She's very hard, isn’t she?" she said to Nick, smiling like a goblin. "She's very difficult. She probably didn't like it because it didn't have any sex in it." And then: "Look, you've embarrassed the poor girl now." His work done, Nick left the room and we resumed, as if nothing had happened."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal."

"The éminence cerise, the bolster behind the throne."

"There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy than connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply…the person who wants to read what I have written."

"I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer."

"I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form."

"Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator."

"Anyway. #MeToo."

"My ex wants to divide up the contents of the former marital home by coming round, when I’m not there, putting a red dot on absolutely anything he wants, then getting me to organise it all into a place where he can have it picked up. Anyone else had this?"

"I have C-PTSD. I wonder why? His "compassionate writings" on mental illness make me want to throw up."

"I changed the locks long ago. He’s been litigating against me for more than two years, and I’m broke. I can’t afford a restraining order."

"Campaigning at a school in Enfield in 2001, Tony Blair was caught unawares by a feisty British Asian sixth-former. Suddenly this apparition arose before him, demolishing Blair's points as speedily as he tried to make them. This time around the New Labour machine haven't wanted to risk any of that. The Emperor has been ferried from Potemkin village to Potemkin hospital, and before he arrives a rigged rent-a-crowd of "ordinary people" are brought in to wave little flags. Journalists have been "embedded" - undoubtedly the cadres were hoping that these trusties would begin to sympathise with the man upon whom their jobs depended [and] they'd cease to notice how much of what he said was utter shit."

"Things are only boring if you are boring."

"Scientists don't frighten me. They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore MISdirectable lines. It's children and conjurers who frighten me. Against scientists, I feel quite confident."

"Confidence is a feeling you get when you don't REALLY understand the situation."

"The combining of their differing perspectives into one viewpoint was a new, vividly revelational experience for both. Now she understood what Dave and Hugh had meant when they talked about seeing everything in ways they had never grasped before, which they found impossible to describe. It reminded her of Sam's repeated assertion of the connectedness of all people, all life, and ultimately all things; that the perceptions of separateness and alienation that form the roots of strife are illusions. She still didn't understand it — not in any way she could have put into words; but, to some degree at any rate, she could feel it. Sam believed that what mystics tried to describe was the freeing of consciousness — deliberately or otherwise — from the restraints that normally define identity, into the quantum-connected paths of the Multiverse."

"Governments everywhere are lying to people to make them hate others that they wouldn't have any quarrel with otherwise. You'd think they'd have learned something after two world wars, but where else can it lead than right where it's all going? Theo's right — the lunatics end up in charge of everything. Sane, normal people don't need power trips."

"We're so saturated with propaganda every way you look that we don't notice it. But when it isn't there, you notice."

"It turns out that information leaks between universes at the quantum level. We think it accounts for all kinds of phenomena, from what drives evolution to strange insights and mystical experiences through the ages. The machine was built as an attempt to investigate and amplify them."

"Sometimes Hugh Brenner thought he'd been born on the wrong planet. It seemed as obvious as anything could be that people achieved more when they learned to get along than they did when they fought over things. If they put as much time and energy into fixing problems instead of blaming each other for being the problem, there wouldn't be any problems left. So far they'd had two full-dress rehearsals for wiping out what passed as civilization. This time it looked as if things might be leading up to the real performance."

"Interference between universes at the quantum level means that information transfer takes place between them."

"I am confident that the things that have been described for centuries as mystical insight are results of abnormal Multiverse sensitivity — either acquired accidentally or developed through training. There is that much in common. The difference is in the direction that consciousness looks in — the part of the Multiverse from which information enters awareness. In the traditional meditative state, the mind expands into the present. Its experience is of knowing — direct perception of a timeless reality that transcends the limited world of the senses. The QUADAR, by contrast, tunes to the future. It delivers an experience of feelings and premonitions. One reveals what is; the other, what could be. Actuality versus potential."

"On Earth they've forgotten how to make everything except money. But what good is it, if there's nothing worthwhile left to buy?"

"Sweet are the words of Love, sweeter his thoughts: Sweetest of all what Love nor says nor thinks."

"What the Buddhists teach is to free yourself from the three great evils in life: greed — which means all kinds of craving — hatred, and delusion. But delusion is really the cause of the other two. We crave that which we delude ourselves into thinking will bring happiness; we hate those whom we delude ourselves into thinking stand to stop us from getting it."

"Were Love exempt from the militations of Necessity, he were greater than God and the World."

"The three eldest children of Necessity: God, the World and love."