Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure. — Margaret Drabble Failing Copy Share Image
The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom. — Margaret Drabble Bears Copy Share Image
Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts. — Margaret Drabble Conform Copy Share Image
The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is, compensates for the misery of being it. — Margaret Drabble Being Copy Share Image
On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win. — Margaret Drabble Agree Copy Share Image
If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them. — Margaret Drabble Book Copy Share Image
“I don't see how you can go too far, in the right direction” — Margaret Drabble Direction Copy Share Image
“Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable... Why prove that it had ever once been green?” — Margaret Drabble Green Copy Share Image
There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like… — Margaret Drabble Admirer Copy Share Image
The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated,… — Margaret Drabble Caught Copy Share Image
“Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assesment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation… — Margaret Drabble Creativity Copy Share Image
What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster. — Margaret Drabble Class Copy Share Image
Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations. — Margaret Drabble Ability Copy Share Image
You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a… — Margaret Drabble Be careful Copy Share Image
“Mid-life crises, in Fran’s ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises.” — Margaret Drabble Youth Copy Share Image
“Before Octavia was born, I used to think that love bore some relation to merit and to beauty, but now I saw… — Margaret Drabble Beauty Copy Share Image
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 Abandoned Copy Share Image
“The dining area of the Premier Inn is geared to dispel elderly apprehensions, not to reinforce them. It is noisy and colourful… — Margaret Drabble Food Copy Share Image
“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 Like Meat Copy Share Image
What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could… — Margaret Drabble Annoying Copy Share Image
“La notte e vicina per me. Those were the words that an elderly Italian woman, an old crone who swept the stairs,… — Margaret Drabble Years ago Copy Share Image
“Minor talents or failing talents ask much of those who associate with them. They suck, they cling, they sour, they devour, and… — Margaret Drabble Ambition Copy Share Image
Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have… — Margaret Drabble Children Copy Share Image
I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money… — Margaret Drabble Alive Copy Share Image
“Fran had from an unsuitably early age been attracted by the heroic death, the famous last words, the tragic farewell. Her parents… — Margaret Drabble Death Copy Share Image
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 Age Copy Share Image
“His chief failing was a habit of cracking heavy pedantic jokes; he was unable to let a good idea drop, and remarked… — Margaret Drabble Failure Copy Share Image
“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 Seeing Life Copy Share Image
Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. — Margaret Drabble Child Copy Share Image
“Robots would save the elderly from the woes of the ageing flesh.” — Margaret Drabble Elderly Copy Share Image
The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book. — Margaret Drabble Book Copy Share Image
Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die... — Margaret Drabble Abandoned Copy Share Image
How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have… — Margaret Drabble Dislike Copy Share Image
“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 Stupid Pointless Copy Share Image
