"People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe"
About this Quote
Credit is supposed to be a social currency, but Fay Weldon frames it as something closer to a mirror. "People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe" lands with the cool sting of a novelist who has spent a career watching how reputations get written in real time: not by objective merit, but by the story you tell about your own worth.
The intent is quietly polemical. Weldon isn’t praising confidence in the TED-talk sense; she’s diagnosing the way authority is co-produced. If you don’t believe in your work, your boundaries, your right to take up space, others sense the vacancy and fill it with their own, usually smaller estimate. "Only" does the heavy lifting: it narrows the range of what recognition can be, implying that society’s generosity has limits set by our self-conception.
Subtext: this is also about performance and complicity. Self-belief becomes a kind of social script that cues the audience how to respond. That’s empowering, but it’s also a trap. If credit depends on belief, then those trained to doubt themselves - women, outsiders, anyone conditioned to be "grateful" - are structurally disadvantaged. Weldon, writing out of late-20th-century feminist currents and the literary marketplace’s appetite for confidence as much as craft, knows that talent without self-authorization often gets treated as a hobby.
Contextually, it reads like a hard-earned note from the front lines of institutions where "humility" is praised selectively. The line works because it flatters no one: it exposes credit as less moral than transactional, and forces a question that’s uncomfortable precisely because it’s practical. What do you teach people to believe about you?
The intent is quietly polemical. Weldon isn’t praising confidence in the TED-talk sense; she’s diagnosing the way authority is co-produced. If you don’t believe in your work, your boundaries, your right to take up space, others sense the vacancy and fill it with their own, usually smaller estimate. "Only" does the heavy lifting: it narrows the range of what recognition can be, implying that society’s generosity has limits set by our self-conception.
Subtext: this is also about performance and complicity. Self-belief becomes a kind of social script that cues the audience how to respond. That’s empowering, but it’s also a trap. If credit depends on belief, then those trained to doubt themselves - women, outsiders, anyone conditioned to be "grateful" - are structurally disadvantaged. Weldon, writing out of late-20th-century feminist currents and the literary marketplace’s appetite for confidence as much as craft, knows that talent without self-authorization often gets treated as a hobby.
Contextually, it reads like a hard-earned note from the front lines of institutions where "humility" is praised selectively. The line works because it flatters no one: it exposes credit as less moral than transactional, and forces a question that’s uncomfortable precisely because it’s practical. What do you teach people to believe about you?
Quote Details
| Topic | Confidence |
|---|
More Quotes by Fay
Add to List
