Mary Wesley Quotes

They may turn out to be a great disappointment, or perhaps they may be full of enchanting surprises.

Twenty years ago, I was living in a lovely cottage on the edge of Dartmoor but I couldn't afford to run a car.

That image of the countryside being a threatening place still exists. People continue to resist the challenge of learning about aspects of life they don't understand.

I was sent to a finishing school, which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.

Unimaginative people are spared quite a lot. They're often much happier, because they don't go through all the variety of conceptions of the person they love.

I always read that men don't like intelligent girls, but I've always found the reverse.

People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier.

Rebecca is an example of how not to manage men. The rules of the game never change, it requires subtlety.

Unimaginative people are spared quite a lot.

I have a garden, and I'm passionately interested in young people.

My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.

I don't write for any particular kind of person.

A lot of people stop short. They don't actually die but they say, 'Right I'm old, and I'm going to retire,' and then they dwindle into nothing. They go off to Florida and become jolly boring.

Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

It seemed sensible to move to a market town where I could walk everywhere.

My first husband would never make up his mind in less than five years, so I used to get him to think that whatever course of action needed to be taken was his idea. Then he'd go right ahead.

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

I never really know the title of a book until it's finished.

Of course risk-taking does not always pay off, but it's a lot of fun!

We all lie to each other, present some sort of front.

Looking back, I understand that I was teaching myself to write.

I found out only recently that we were making an index of enemy code signs.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.