Top 90 Maeve Binchy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everybody is a hero in their own story if you just look.”

— Maeve Binchy

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

2. “I don’t think you’re happier if you’re thin or beautiful or rich or married. You have to make your own happiness. My heroines do not become beautiful elegant swans, they become confident ducks and get on with life.”

— Maeve Binchy

3. “The great thing about getting older is that you become more mellow. Things aren’t as black and white, and you become much more tolerant. You can see the good in things much more easily rather than getting enraged as you used to do when you were young.”

— Maeve Binchy

4. “I’m an escapist kind of writer.”

— Maeve Binchy

5. “In Ireland every place you visit and every person you meet has a story. And they love to tell you their stories. Everyone is interested in everything; in a land of storytellers, you will never be bored.”

— Maeve Binchy

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

6. “Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don’t put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn’t say in real life.”

— Maeve Binchy

7. “Success is not like a cake that needs to be divided. It’s more like a heap of stones – a cairn. If someone is successful, they add a stone to the cairn. It gets very high and can be seen from all over the world. That’s how I see it.”

— Maeve Binchy

8. “Nobody is ordinary if you know where to look.”

— Maeve Binchy

9. “Women who start out as ugly ducklings don’t become beautiful swans. What they mainly become is confident ducks. They take charge of their lives.”

— Maeve Binchy

10. “Money doesn’t make you happy, but it gives a zone of comfort around you.”

— Maeve Binchy

11. “I am not a member of Fat Liberation, nor do I think that obesity is healthy. But I do believe that in many ways my life has been a more charmed and happy one because I was always large.”

— Maeve Binchy

12. “I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.”

— Maeve Binchy

13. “Happiness is in our own hearts. I have no regrets of anything in the past. I’m totally cheerful and happy, and I think that a lot of your attitude is not in the circumstances you find yourself in, but in the circumstances you make for yourself.”

— Maeve Binchy

14. “I have always believed that life is too short for rows and disagreements. Even if I think I’m right, I would prefer to apologize and remain friends rather than win and be an enemy.”

— Maeve Binchy

15. “My brother married young, and his is the best marriage I know.”

— Maeve Binchy

16. “I’ve been very lucky and I have a happy old age with good family and friends still around.”

— Maeve Binchy

17. “My memory of my home was that it was very happy, and that there was more fun and life there than there was anywhere else.”

— Maeve Binchy

Featured in: Fun Quotes

18. “I have been lucky enough to travel a lot, meet great people in many lands. I have liked almost everyone I met along the way.”

— Maeve Binchy

19. “I’ve had a good life, full of more success and happiness than I ever expected.”

— Maeve Binchy

20. “I don’t have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.”

— Maeve Binchy

21. “I think I’m brave because I’ve made decisions based – I hope not entirely selfishly – on what I think is right for me to do next.”

— Maeve Binchy

22. “The whole art of life is knowing the right time to say things.”

— Maeve Binchy

23. “When my sister Joan arrived, I asked if I could swap her for a rabbit. When I think what a marvellous friend she’s been, I’m so glad my parents didn’t take me at my word.”

— Maeve Binchy

24. “I have an irregular heartbeat, so that means a fair amount of medication – and I have blood pressure pills, too, but no vitamins or supplements.”

— Maeve Binchy

25. “She put her head down on the table and cried all the tears that she knew she should have cried in the past year and a half. But they weren’t ready then, they were now.”

— Maeve Binchy

26. “I’m getting better, happier, and nicer as I grow older, so I would be terrific in a couple of hundred years time.”

— Maeve Binchy

27. “I didn’t get excited by weight loss, and since I was already happy being fat, I couldn’t see the point of it all. I’m 6 ft. and weigh about 18 st. or 19 st., but weighing myself is not something I do with much pleasure.”

— Maeve Binchy

28. “I was the big, bossy older sister, full of enthusiasms, mad fantasies, desperate urges to be famous, and anxious to be a saint – a settled sort of saint, not one who might have to suffer or die for her faith.”

— Maeve Binchy

29. “If you don’t go to a dance, you can never be rejected, but you’ll never get to dance, either.”

— Maeve Binchy

30. “We have to make our own happiness, and we have to make our own decisions and play the hand that is dealt to us.”

— Maeve Binchy

31. “I think you’ve got to play the hand that you’re dealt and stop wishing for another hand.”

— Maeve Binchy

32. “I was lucky enough to be fairly quick at understanding what was taught, but unlucky enough not to be really interested in it, so I always got my exams but never had the scholar’s love of learning for its own sake.”

— Maeve Binchy

33. “Never mind money; the gifts of time and skill call into being the richest marketplace in the world.”

— Maeve Binchy

34. “An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.”

— Maeve Binchy

35. “We are all the heroes and heroines of our own lives. Our love stories are amazingly romantic; our losses and betrayals and disappointments are gigantic in our own minds.”

— Maeve Binchy

36. “You say to yourself: ‘What could people, in all these countries, find in my books?’ and yet I think we’re all the same, anywhere. Everybody is a hero or a dramatic person in their own story if you just know where to look.”

— Maeve Binchy

37. “I remember watching myself on video and being so disappointed with myself because I was constantly moving around the place and laughing. I thought, ‘I must be so much louder than I think I am. From inside it feels fine.’”

— Maeve Binchy

38. “I think I was dealt a good hand. I have happy genes.”

— Maeve Binchy

39. “If I had my life to live all over again, I really think I would have been a fit person. Looking around me, I realise that the men and women who walked and ran and swam and played sport look better and feel better than the rest of us.”

— Maeve Binchy

40. “My mother was a trained nurse, and she’d tell me that patients would fight as they were administered anaesthetic, grappling to get the gas mask off their face.”

— Maeve Binchy

41. “We’re nothing if we’re not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing.”

— Maeve Binchy

42. “I have great family and good friends; the stories I told became popular, and people all over the world bought them.”

— Maeve Binchy

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

43. “I discovered that men were just like everyone else, really. They liked you if you were good-tempered and easy to talk to. And being a big girl meant other females trusted you more and confided in you.”

— Maeve Binchy

44. “Of course, I should have done what doctors said and walked for miles every day and not eaten great amounts of butter. But then, life is life, and if we all did what they said we should do, it would be a different world.”

— Maeve Binchy

45. “I once got a huge, expensive flower arrangement from a person I didn’t like, who sent it out of pure guilt. It had a hideous bird-of-paradise in the middle, and I thought it would never fade and die. I hated it.”

— Maeve Binchy

46. “The most important thing to realize is that everyone is capable of telling a story.”

— Maeve Binchy

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

47. “I look placid, you see, that’s why people think I’m fine. Inside I worry a lot.”

— Maeve Binchy

48. “I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we’ve all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters.”

— Maeve Binchy

49. “Happiness is knowing and appreciating what you’ve got. I am very, very, very grateful for what, to me, is dead easy.”

— Maeve Binchy

50. “Writing is a bit like going on a diet; you should either tell everyone or no one.”

— Maeve Binchy