A lot of people stop short. They don't actually die but they say, 'Right I'm old, and I'm going to retire,' and then they dwindle into nothing. They go off to Florida and become jolly boring.
Mary Wesley

Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.
Mary Wesley

I always read that men don't like intelligent girls, but I've always found the reverse.
Mary Wesley

I don't write for any particular kind of person.
Mary Wesley

I found out only recently that we were making an index of enemy code signs.
Mary Wesley

I have a garden, and I'm passionately interested in young people.
Mary Wesley

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.
Mary Wesley

I never really know the title of a book until it's finished.
Mary Wesley

I remember the evacuee children from towns and cities throwing stones at the farm animals. When we explained that if you did that you wouldn't have any milk, meat or eggs, they soon learned to respect the animals.
Mary Wesley

I was sent to a finishing school, which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.
Mary Wesley


Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case, and I've fallen in love all my life, one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different, for better or worse.
Mary Wesley

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.
Mary Wesley

It seemed sensible to move to a market town where I could walk everywhere.
Mary Wesley

It was pretty awful for us children because we never really knew the local children. Mother was keen for us to learn languages, so our travels took us to France and Italy, as well as the West Country.
Mary Wesley

Looking back, I understand that I was teaching myself to write.
Mary Wesley

My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.
Mary Wesley

My first husband would never make up his mind in less than five years, so I used to get him to think that whatever course of action needed to be taken was his idea. Then he'd go right ahead.
Mary Wesley

Of course risk-taking does not always pay off, but it's a lot of fun!
Mary Wesley

People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier.
Mary Wesley

Rebecca is an example of how not to manage men. The rules of the game never change, it requires subtlety.
Mary Wesley