Best 11 quotes of Jane Gardam on MyQuotes

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

I gave myself to my children. It happens to some women.

I just knew I would be a writer. It just seemed the only sensible thing to do.

I think the most dangerous influence for a young writer is to be treated with cynicism or discouragement.

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

Somewhere inside we do know everything about ourselves. There is no real forgetting. Perhaps we know somewhere, too, about all there is to come.

The complexion of a novelist is seldom rosy (Paul Bailey once announced to a heavy-hearted audience of novelists at PEN that we have always been an ugly tribe). We are engaged in indoor activity, haemorrhoidal, prone to chillblains, poor of circulation.

Christianity is supposed to be all about love but it’s utterly useless when you’re in love.

He has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.

His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit. Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement.

I was quite enchanted with myself. I had always thought I had very strong views on sexual morality. I found I had nothing of the kind.