This much I know / Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon at home in Dorset. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

THIS MUCH I KNOW

Fay Weldon

Interview by Lucy Siegle
Sun 30 Aug 2009 00.01 BST

The binge drinkers will grow up to be wives and mothers. If you see enough pictures of young girls drinking outside pubs and falling over, you decide young women are all like that and despise them. But they're all right and they will be all right.

I find the phrase "organised criminals" comforting. When I hear it I thank Gosomebody, somewhere knows what they're doing and has a plan.

Fay Weldon

I never said rape was good. I said once that it was better than being killed or being raped and then killed. I'd rather be raped than killed. If both things are going to happen to you, well that's really bad. Having been raped and having had my children ill and in mortal danger, well, the latter is worse. Rape is awful but it is not the worst awfulness, and to suggest that it is is probably socially unhelpful. You end up with a woman in Angola who is thrown out of society because she's somehow polluted. I should've said exactly this and defended myself properly at the time. The backlash was hurtful. I phoned Germaine Greer who was wonderful. She said: "Oh, it's only a penis for god's sake!"

Fay Weldon

No amount of sex education is going to help a young person not get pregnant. It just makes them feel even more sexy. And now girls have the state for fathers. Why are we surprised?

I was accused of defiling the novel. The deal was that I must mention Bulgari 12 times in a novel I wrote for them as a giveaway. My agent was terribly good and knocked them down to nine and a half mentions. In the end I mentioned them 46 times.

They refused to publish me in Sweden after Bulgari. But my husband still drives a Saab.

There's an incredible, extraordinary dependency on physical appearance. It's the great diversion from the fact that the asteroid and swine flu are about to strike. People would really far rather not read any of that stuff but look at someone in a bikini.

I love being re-touched in photographs. I absolutely encourage it.

One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.

I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?

What you look like never seemed to matter. I went through my early years buttoned up to the neck, but then I found myself on a bar stool with not many clothes on when I worked as a hostess. Men instantly clustered around. But then you attract men you don't necessarily want to keep around.

You have to have a man to survive. Culturally we've reached a stage where women feel the same as they did 50 years ago - truly miserable without one.

Vibrators are nothing compared to men. Sex is more than an orgasm. If any woman says to me, "I don't need a man I've got a vibrator," I think, well what sort of life have you had?

It's a myth that I thought up the slogan "Go to work on an egg." It was one of those late nights, when the client's rejected everything and you're the copy chief and desperate.

I flicked through some stuff from 1932 and spotted it, "Go to work on an egg", so we put that up at the top. It didn't sell any more eggs, of course, but everyone remembers it.

I can't remember having ever made a decision about my life. I've gone with the flow.

THE GUARDIAN