Novelists From England

"'There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.'"

"Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?"

"'You know perfectly well that women can and do - or rather did - handle the most complicated and delicate machines when they took the trouble to understand them. What generally happens is that they're too lazy to take the trouble unless they have to.'"

"Life isn't very long. You see that plainly when you begin to look at it from the other end. Not time to do very much."

""We ourselves have a tradition of taking beatings, and then winning wars," said Bocker."

"In the country you can at least grow things. You do have a chance. But a city is a sort of desert of bricks and stones. Once you've used up what is there, you're done for."

"Most births are painful, and none are pretty."

"'Somehow running away seldom seems to work out well unless you have a pretty good idea what you're running to.""

"Truth is not altered by belief or disbelief."

"The Americans had got into the habit of regarding the moon as a piece of U.S.-bespoken real estate that they would get around to developing when they were ready."

"There are some forms of knowledge which it is unwise to spread; men are not yet ready to handle them."

"She agreed, really. But she said, well, this is the kind of world we have to live in. There is so very much that's wrong with it, but then life is so short that the best anyone can do is to come to terms with it while doing her best to preserve her own standards. She said it would be different if we had more time to spare, but now there isn't enough margin to make people do things about it. By the time your children have grown up you're beginning to get old, so it isn't worth trying to do much, and then in another twenty-five years it will be the same for them, and— Why, Diana, what on earth's the matter . . . ?"

"There is many a flower which would not be growing if the dung had not happened to fall where it did."

"The frustrations are still buzzing about, and soon they are going to find a new place to swarm."

"On the principle that if you walk briskly with an air of purpose ninety-nine per cent of the people you meet will assume it is a proper purpose, I did just that."

"It takes civilised people quite a while to appreciate 'the big lie' technique."

"A lot has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened? There is a that, historically, have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more, in search of work, and to gravitate to cities. The rich, meanwhile, have more to spend on luxuries, including products that hail from far-flung places. The world becomes more tightly connected through trade, and germs, people and luxury goods travel together along trade routes that connect cities. On paper, it looks like a perfect storm."

"Pandemics don’t always trigger , but they can do, by throwing into relief the very inequalities that caused them. That’s because they hit the poor hardest – those in low-paid or unstable employment, who live in crowded accommodation, have underlying health issues, and for whom healthcare is less affordable or less accessible. This was true in the past and remains so today. During the the death rate was three times higher in the poorest fifth of England’s population than in the richest. Covid-19 is showing no signs of departing from the pattern, which, because of the way the socioeconomic dice fall, also has a racial dimension. But there is something brand new about this pandemic, which has never been seen before in the history of humanity – and that is our unprecedented global experiment in . These lockdown measures are designed to slow the spread of the disease, relieve the burden on s and ultimately save lives – and it looks as if they may be doing that. But they may also be exacerbating social inequalities themselves."

"In India there have been reports of deaths among unemployed returning home in search of food; many countries, including the US, have seen workers taking industrial action, and anger has been expressed in rural communities over wealthy city-dwellers retreating to their second homes for the duration. Governments should keep an eye on these developments, in weighing up when and how to lift the lockdown, because even if it’s difficult to argue today that the cure is worse than the disease, the cure might provoke an entirely different malaise – and history teaches us that no society is immune to that. That’s the . In the long term, of course, they – and we – should address the dreadful inequality in our societies, which this pandemic is picking apart with a lethal scalpel."

"[Referring to Trish, her civil partner] I asked her about earlier girlfriends and she said she'd never had a year-after-year relationship, and I thought: "Right, I'm going to be that." And I have been, so far."

"[After reaching no. 7 in the best-seller lists] But a certain JK Rowling came along and you're never going to beat that. And there's always been one or two others much better than me. [Better or bigger?] Bigger! [laughs] Occasionally better."

"[Her mother stopped her daughter from wearing any jewelry. Wilson refers to a large rose quartz ring on her finger] I mean, isn't it pathetic when, even in your 70s, you wear things that a psychiatrist would point out is rebelling against your mother?"

"My mum would have loved Shirley Temple as a daughter – full of confidence, tap-dancing all over the place in flouncy clothes, and showing off. [She had] A girl sitting there reading a book, looking gormless."

"It is strange…that sometimes people assume the worst of children if they come from poor families. I remember being astonished when I took my daughter to a party given by her schoolfriend’s parents. They lived in a lovely, big house very near the block of council flats where I grew up. The mother was very friendly to me, and said how pleased she was that our daughters were friends because obviously she could have nothing to do with ‘those dreadful scary rough children from the council flats’. I didn’t want to embarrass her by saying that I had once been one of those very children."

"I don't think that girls would ever have wanted a grey-haired, wrinkly writer as a role model if they were wanting to feel good about maybe being gay…I'm sure they could find much more glamorous examples."

"I can't think of a book where there's a woman born into a working-class background, who in her 70s is living a very comfortable, upper-middle-class sort of life; a woman who married at 19, had a baby at 21, was a policeman's wife for years, but whose marriage broke up in late middle age and who became very well known for a time. She then met a woman and became very happy with her. There isn't one!"

"I’ve tried hard…I don't know … my experience of my own dad and my own ex-husband possibly has some effect. I will remedy this. It is very unfair. I have tried harder, but I just can't quite get there yet."

"Oh I admire untidiness so much. There's something in the emotional carelessness, the freedom of it, that I quietly applaud."

"What I'm trying to do in all these novels is mirror a contemporary preoccupation. I'm not providing any solutions. I'm simply saying: "Can we please get the conversation going?""

"I wanted to write a novel about the sandwich generation: parents falling to pieces at one end of your life and children being quite demanding at the other. You, the woman, are probably working full-time, but society, which is really very old-fashioned, still expects women to do all the caring."

"For all that somebody gets dumped every nanosecond in the world, you don't want to be lumped in with everybody else – you want it to be expressed as poignantly and vividly as you feel it yourself [...] A cliche is only a cliche if it's happening in someone else's life."

"I've done the countryside for decades. The last dog went to paradise in the summer, dear old boy. So it's just me now. Even if I'm miserable in London, I'm happier miserable. You have to see the countryside on a grey afternoon to really understand what it means to live there. It can be quite alarming."

"In ordinary life [...] if we're in love, we still have to go and see old aunts in nursing homes, take the children to school, and go to Tesco, and it's that juggling act that the 19th-century novelists are jolly good at, but that we have lacked in fiction now for about a generation. [She has set out to] do the things the traditional novel has always done: to mirror reality, explore people's emotional lives, but also to involve a great many other dilemmas. I think my books are just the dear old traditional novel making a quiet comeback."

"I was born into the Church of England, I'm still in it, and I go to church. It's as natural to me as breathing - you know, God's always been there, he will always be there. I don't talk about it elaborately, and I never will, because I'm not that sort of Englishwoman: I mean, evangelism gives me the horrors."

"All the middle-class people I write about would have had nannies and servants in the past, but now we do everything ourselves and children absolutely dominate our lives. It's their demands, their homework, their nightmares, their insistence on staying down, because downstairs is more interesting than upstairs. I don't think children are particularly sweet, but I think they're absolutely fascinating, and I take them as seriously as they take themselves. I don't think they're dear little innocents in this never-never nursery land; I think they're adults in the making, and they suffer great fears and anxieties and pains. And we give them silly food looking like fish and rabbits all cut up tiny, and dress them up in dolly clothes."

"I'm no lyrical stylist, you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual."

"[On the Aga saga tag being applied to her novels] It's so inaccurate [...] Actually, the novels are quite subversive, quite bleak. It's all rather patronising isn't it?"

"Although it must be bloody annoying for a writer to have her work reduced to a flip phrase, I have only used it once and in a perfectly respectable context. What happened to the term after that is no more my responsibility than it would be Trollope's if her jokey reference to a certain kind of serious fiction as "grim lit" took hold."

"The comparison to Jane Austen makes me fidget. There is a huge gulf between being great and being good. I know exactly which category I fall into and which she falls into. They are not the same. On a good day, I might be good."

"[Asked "Why do you write?"] A combination of a desire to communicate, and a passionate belief in the power of story to build up relationships, to shape us. People-watching."

"It was ironic that even my small triumphs were not attributed to me."

"When it comes to bodies, there is violence done every day. I did not think of body horror as a sub-genre when writing it, but I think the body is a source of great anxiety to each of us. So you shave (legs, armpits, or chin), taking a blade to yourself; perhaps you exercise, causing yourself pain; perhaps you fast or diet, denying yourself; perhaps your job means you have to stay awake. If you think about it, life itself consists of low-levels of body horror all the time. To write fiction, we just exaggerate some of what happens naturally…"

"If you want pure science, crack open a textbook or buy a journal. Fiction is about people. To foreground people as opposed to science does not weaken the genre, it opens it up. Insisting on one incarnation of a phenomenon is antiscientific. Science observes phenomena and incorporates new manifestations into the corpus. “Real” science fiction reminds me of certain academics who are ossified in their little knowledge fiefdoms. The human factor is messy. The human factor cannot be quantified with P-values and Confidence Intervals. This horrifies some readers and writers, but I love it. There is nothing wrong with foregrounding science, but there is room in genre for every flavour. More variety leads to more fans. That can’t be a bad thing."

"I have met lots of women who have grown up in Turkey who cannot bring themselves to swear in Turkish. But in English they use the F-word all the time. Writing is like that for me."

"Protagonists don’t have to be likable. They just have to be compelling. The key characteristic of a protagonist, whether they are conventionally good or evil, is that the reader must be interested in knowing what they will do next, or how they will respond to what happens to them. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how much I detest all that ‘hero’s journey’ crap…"

"In the ebb and flow of battle there are usually only brief flashes of bravery before the brave become the dead."

"Many women are asking: why do some women choose to cover their heads? We have to understand this and other questions. This is one of the biggest challenges for feminism today. What is worrying is that when women are divided into categories it is the status quo – the patriarchy – that benefits.…"

"I bring everything I know to whatever I write, and I believe the same of other writers. A person’s complete life experience forms the basis of authorial voice, in my opinion. To hold back any part makes a narrative feel contrived."

"I learned to pay attention to the readers and not to the madness…Because to be a writer in Turkey is a bit like being kissed on one cheek and slapped on the other."

"Questions of identity have always played a large part in my thinking and writing; and, of course, race is a key component of identity. Certainly for me, and certainly in Britain."