Margaret Drabble

“Lucky in work, unlucky in love.”

— Margaret Drabble

Nothing fails like failure

— Margaret Drabble

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

— Margaret Drabble

London, how could one ever be tired of it?

— Margaret Drabble

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

— Margaret Drabble

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

— Margaret Drabble

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

— Margaret Drabble

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

— Margaret Drabble

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

— Margaret Drabble

The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is, compensates for the misery of being it.

— Margaret Drabble

On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

— Margaret Drabble

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

— Margaret Drabble

“Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable... Why prove that it had ever once been green?”

— Margaret Drabble

“I don't see how you can go too far, in the right direction”

— Margaret Drabble

The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated,…

— Margaret Drabble

There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like…

— Margaret Drabble

What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.

— Margaret Drabble

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.

— Margaret Drabble

“Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assesment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation…

— Margaret Drabble

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have…

— Margaret Drabble

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...

— Margaret Drabble

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a…

— Margaret Drabble

Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it,…

— Margaret Drabble

“The dining area of the Premier Inn is geared to dispel elderly apprehensions, not to reinforce them. It is noisy and colourful…

— Margaret Drabble

“Bread and dripping, Dorothy had mentioned. You couldn’t offer that to man or boy now, not because they wouldn’t eat it, although…

— Margaret Drabble

“Minor talents or failing talents ask much of those who associate with them. They suck, they cling, they sour, they devour, and…

— Margaret Drabble

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could…

— Margaret Drabble

“La notte e vicina per me. Those were the words that an elderly Italian woman, an old crone who swept the stairs,…

— Margaret Drabble

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have…

— Margaret Drabble

World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in…

— Margaret Drabble

“Fran had from an unsuitably early age been attracted by the heroic death, the famous last words, the tragic farewell. Her parents…

— Margaret Drabble

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate…

— Margaret Drabble

“His chief failing was a habit of cracking heavy pedantic jokes; he was unable to let a good idea drop, and remarked…

— Margaret Drabble

“She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn’t fashionable these days, but it’s her…

— Margaret Drabble

“Robots would save the elderly from the woes of the ageing flesh.”

— Margaret Drabble

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

— Margaret Drabble

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

— Margaret Drabble

“Mid-life crises, in Fran’s ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises.”

— Margaret Drabble

“Before Octavia was born, I used to think that love bore some relation to merit and to beauty, but now I saw…

— Margaret Drabble

“One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over,…

— Margaret Drabble