Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd DBE FRSL, is an English novelist, biographer, and critic...
failure failing
Nothing fails like failure
trying needs print
I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
fate birth abandoned
Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...
discovery play would-be
There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.
dying tradition ends
I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
poverty poor scales
Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
journey deception may
Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.
too-much enough admirer
There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.
iraq done world
My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world,
nice guilt body
And there isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.
desire facts conform
Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
travel discovery people
There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.
teaching book people
I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
tired london
London, how could one ever be tired of it?