Deborah Moggach Quotes

“The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.”

— Deborah Moggach

“The world is chaotic. All artists know this, but they try to make sense of it. Sophia has made sense of it for him. She has stitched it together like the most beautiful cloak. Her love has sewn it together and they can wrap it around themselves and be safe from the world. Nobody can reach them.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Remember you are everything, or you are nothing. If you are everything, then your heart is so big it can hold all of humanity within itself, you have no jealousy or narrowness. You are in the heart of every creature and every creature is in your heart. There is only bliss.
Intro to Part 2, Chapter 4. Credit given to Swami Purna.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Everything will be all right in the end ... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Sophia will not come. How mad he is to imagine, for a moment, that she might. Why should she risk everything for him? He can offer her nothing, only love.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Even when I succeed in getting there we only have an hour. At ten o'clock the night-watch trumpet sounds and those who are out return to bed. What a blameless, hardworking nation we are. In bed by ten, faithful husbands and faithful wives. It is no city for lovers, for those out late on the street are viewed with suspicion.”

— Deborah Moggach

“After the storm the city lies becalmed. It is a sunny morning, still and cold. Branches litter the streets like broken limbs. People clear away the wreckage. They swarm around like ants whose anthill has been scuffed; how doggedly they rebuild their lives.”

— Deborah Moggach

“It is a nice sunny day; his bunions have stopped hurting. There is always something to celebrate, in Gerrit's view.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Evelyn's New Age daughter will discover that a good shag beats hugging a guru any day.
- Helen Falconer, book reviewer for The Guardian”

— Deborah Moggach

“Can we be blamed for feeling we're too old to change? Too scared of disappointment to start it all again? We get up every morning, we do our best. Nothing else matters.”

— Deborah Moggach

“One sees more and more people who are miserable and demented and you feel it would be both kind and wise to leave them a few pills.”

— Deborah Moggach

“It's not a failure if a marriage or partnership ends after a certain number of years. I think, in general, we expect too much of partners. We can't fulfil a person's every single need and, after ten years or so, many relationships wear out. If we were more philosophical about it, we wouldn't try to blame the other person or be bitter.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Independence is fun, especially when there's a beloved waiting in the wings, and freedom makes you a more interesting person. Having separate lives brings fresh air into a relationship.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Cycling is the only way to free ourselves from the misery of the Tube, the wall-to-wall buses that line Oxford Street, the hopelessness of even thinking about driving.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.”

— Deborah Moggach

“It was very liberating, living in a foreign country, a place where everything was new and strange - the food, the customs, the climate, everything.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Once you start cycling, the city opens up for you. No longer are you fighting it, hot and frustrated; no longer are you at the mercy of bus drivers, roadworks, decisions made by others and over which you have no control. Believe me, once you've tasted this freedom, you're hooked.”

— Deborah Moggach

I do believe that we baby-boomers are reinventing ageing as we enter it. We're living longer and expecting more from life; the success of 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,' and other films and novels about finding love late in life, have shown that if we're up for it, there are adventures awaiting us.

— Deborah Moggach

“Nothing beats weaving through the rush-hour traffic or whizzing past the eternal gridlock that is the Strand.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I was never a lonely child who sat looking at the rain sliding down the window.”

— Deborah Moggach

When I was young, I couldn't imagine women of 60 falling in love. For one thing, people used to stay married; they weren't out in the jungle, searching for romance. Besides, these women just looked so ancient - permed hair, beige cardis.

— Deborah Moggach

“Discover the times when you're most creative - mornings, nights, afternoons - and clear the time to work then. Many writers find the mornings are best, and the afternoons are only good for editorial corrections, or getting the washing done. Others can only work through the night, drunk.”

— Deborah Moggach

I have four Rhode Island Red hens. I get two eggs from them a day. They're feathered dustbins that eat leftover food and weeds, and they're easy to look after - I throw some grain at them in the morning, take the eggs and that's it. I love the sound of clucking.

— Deborah Moggach

“The traditional writer is a sensitive only child, asthmatic, who sits on the window seat watching the drops of rain slide down the pane, very introspective. I'm not inward-looking. I would never go to a shrink. I don't want to know what I'm thinking. I don't really like discussions in my family. It may be an avoidance thing.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I've had a very lucky life because I'm of this generation where everything was possible.”

— Deborah Moggach

“'Tulip Fever' did change my life. It did that thing that sometimes happens when a book takes off - it opened doors on to whole other worlds.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Living apart is hardly possible if people have children together. It can also be more expensive to maintain two homes. But then, it's expensive to break up when you live in one property.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I'm mad about gardening. I have an allotment on the other side of Hampstead Heath, and I keep three hens in my garden.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Bringing my two children up while writing was just a part of life. I'd much rather have had their interruptions than been stuck in a sterile office. This way, I had welcome distractions. I had to load the washing machine, I had to go out and buy lemons.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I am a great believer in having the power to end your life and knowing that, in extremis, you can. But I would not want to involve anybody else in my actions if it could imperil them.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Living together places a huge burden on the other person to be lover, friend, entertainments manager, chef, domestic help, which is almost impossible and can lead to disappointment. If you don't live together, you spend more time with other people and ease the pressure off your lover.”

— Deborah Moggach

I'd like to be a jazz singer, but I couldn't possibly do it; nobody would want me, anyway.

— Deborah Moggach

“I'm always running my mouth off and getting myself in trouble, so I'm trying to do it less.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I'm quite easy to live with and very easy going.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Men take much more notice of older women in France, so I might move there. I think I'm a good bet.”

— Deborah Moggach

My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.

— Deborah Moggach

“Psych yourself up until you're confident that the world will be interested in what happens to your characters. Confidence is key.”

— Deborah Moggach

“You can cycle through London on the side streets, which are less polluted - and much more interesting anyway.”

— Deborah Moggach

“A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.”

— Deborah Moggach

“All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance.”

— Deborah Moggach

“Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'”

— Deborah Moggach

“I found Hollywood pretty bruising and uncreative. The executives are all in thrall to the boss, and spend their times double-guessing him or her, and trying to remember what he/she said and then applying them to the script, whether it was useful or not. They're all in fear for their jobs.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I look in the mirror expecting to be 34 and see someone who is 58. What's that all about? I haven't even thought about turning 60 yet, but so many of my friends have celebrated it by now that it's lost its terror. And I don't mind being 58; it's just such a surprise when one doesn't feel it at all.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I work every day from 9:30 or so until lunchtime. In the afternoons, I become a normal person - go shopping and do the garden and look after my grandchildren.”

— Deborah Moggach

“My favourite room in my house is easily the top room, which is a bedroom but also a bathroom, with a big, wooden carved bath, two huge fireplaces and a raised bit in the corner for performances. I've had some really lovely parties and poetry readings up there.”

— Deborah Moggach

My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.

— Deborah Moggach

“Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.”

— Deborah Moggach

You keep your past by having sisters. As you get older, they're the only ones who don't get bored if you talk about your memories.

— Deborah Moggach

“Whatever you do they will love you; even if they don't love you they are connected to you till you die. You can be boring and tedious with -sisters, whereas you have to put on a good face with friends.”

— Deborah Moggach