Daily Inspiration Quote by Fay Weldon

A novelist’s jab at “committees” lands because it’s less a business critique than a story theory. Fay Weldon is defending the lone, stubborn agent: the person with a sensibility sharp enough to see what everyone else politely edits away. Committees and companies are built to manage risk, smooth rough edges, and protect reputations. Greatness, in Weldon’s framing, requires the opposite: a willingness to look unreasonable, to follow an idea past the point where it can be justified in a meeting.

The line works because it flatters the reader’s fantasy of authorship while also naming a real structural truth about institutions. Groups can produce excellence, scale, and polish; they rarely produce the weird, singular leap that changes the terms of the game. Committees are consensus machines, and consensus is an aesthetic in its own right: safe, legible, market-tested. Weldon’s subtext is that culture gets strangled by governance. The more stakeholders you add, the more the original intention becomes “brand alignment” rather than vision.

Context matters, too. Weldon came up in a postwar Britain of bureaucracies and gatekeepers, then watched creative work get steadily professionalized - publishing conglomerates, media empires, corporate feminism, institutional ethics. Her novels often skewer social scripts and polite hypocrisies; this sentence is the same move in aphorism form. It’s not an argument against collaboration so much as a warning: when responsibility is distributed, courage evaporates. Great things, she implies, need a name attached - and someone willing to take the heat.