Beryl Bainbridge

Quotes

I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everyone speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.
- James Vinson & D. L. Kirkpatrick (eds.), Contemporary Novelists, 2nd edition, (London: St. James Press, 1976). [1]

Being constantly with the children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.
- Injury Time (London: Abacus, [1977] 2003) ch. 4, pp. 41-42.

She opens her case with an account of her own experience — she married three times and twice it was rotten — and goes on to list, throughout the ages, the devastation perpetuated in the name of love. ...
I disagree with some of her book. She chronicles a horrific list of cruelties and repressions practiced in the name of love and she infers that it is the exception rather than the rule that people know how to love one another.
She must be wrong. What about all those millions of human beings who, long before the welfare state, despite misery, hunger and disease, mostly managed to care for each other with charity and tenderness? I don't know why any of us should presume that we're here to do anything very special, except procreate ...
- "Isn't Love All You Really Need?" The Guardian (7 June 1979), p. 11
- From a review of Jill Tweedie's In the Name of Love, Jonathan Cape, 1979

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.
- The New York Times (1 March 1981)[2]

They were burning the stubbled fields and a great stain of smoke flooded the horizon. Nothing amiss here, nothing derelict, the roofs newly thatched, the hedges trimmed, the gardens bright with flowers.
- English Journey, Or, The Road to Milton Keynes. George Braziller. 1984. p. 25. ISBN 9780807611012. (158 pages)

We would do better to make our judgments on society from a study of literature, for in fiction the concept of division becomes fact — from Disraeli's Sybil with its subtitle 'The Two Nations' and Mrs Gaskell's North & South, through George Eliot, Dickens and Hardy to Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists of Robert Tressell, the novel is choked with the theme of a people divided not only by borders but by circumstances of birth and opportunity.
- Forever England: North and South. BBC books. Duckworth. 1987. p. 9. ISBN 9780563204664. (174 pages; 1st part of quote last part of quote)

My husband, Austin Davies, taught John Lennon at Liverpool Art School. In fact, the night we separated, my husband had a party in our house to which the Beatles, John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe—the one who died—and I can’t remember who else, came. The party went on for three days and nights; I moved out down the road to a friend’s house with the children, and later we divorced amicably. I never saw the Beatles again.
- (Winter 2000) "Beryl Bainbridge, The Art of Fiction No. 164". The Paris Review (issue 157). (interview by Shusha Guppy)

Beryl Bainbridge, who has died of cancer aged 75, wore her hard-won recognition lightly. She was acknowledged as one of the best novelists of her generation, and was made a dame in 2000, but she lost none of her black humour or raffish image to her new status as a literary grande dame. Her prolific output included 18 novels, three of which were filmed, two collections of short stories, several plays for stage and television, and many articles, essays, columns and reviews.
She won the Guardian fiction prize and two Whitbread awards, but although five of her novels reached the Booker prize shortlist – The Dressmaker (1973), The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), An Awfully Big Adventure (1989), Every Man for Himself (1996) and Master Georgie (1998) – none of them won it. She bore the disappointment with a wit and detachment honed by a lifetime's practice.
- Janet Watts, (2 July 2010) "Dame Beryl Bainbridge Obituary". The Guardian.