Daphne du Maurier

Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE (May 13, 1907 – April 19, 1989) was an English author and playwright.

Quotes

The Menace, in movie language, and especially among women, means a heart-throb, a lover, someone with wide shoulders and no hips. A Menace does not have long lashes or a profile; he is always ugly, generally with a crooked nose and if possible a scar; his voice is deep; and he does not say much. When he does speak, the scriptwriters give him short, terse snaps of dialogue, phrases like ‘Lady, take care!’, or ‘Break it up!’, or even just ‘Maybe’. The expression on the ugly face has to be dead-pan and give nothing away, so that sudden death or a woman’s passion leaves it unmoved.
- "The Menace", The Breaking Point: Short Stories (1959)

[As a child] I was always pretending to be someone else … historical characters, all those I invented for myself. I act even to this day. It's the old imagination working, a kind of make believe.
- Interview with Cliff Michelmore, 1977.^[1]

My novels are what is known as popular and sell very well, but I am not a critic’s favourite, indeed I am generally dismissed with a sneer as a bestseller and not reviewed at all.
- Quoted in Scholes, Lucy (13 June 2017). Why Daphne du Maurier was Britain’s mistress of suspense. BBC Online.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
- Opening words, chapter 1
There were no dark trees here, no tangled undergrowth, but on either side of the narrow path stood azaleas and rhododendrons, not blood-coloured like the giants in the drive, but salmon, white, and gold, things of beauty and of grace, drooping their lovely, delicate heads in the soft summer rain.
The air was full of their scent, sweet and heady, and it seemed to me as though their very essence had mingled with the running waters of the stream, and become one with the falling rain and the dank rich moss beneath our feet. There was no sound here but the tumbling of the little stream, and the quiet rain.
- The second Mrs de Winter's first impression of the Happy Valley on the grounds of Manderley (in chapter 10)

I write about the black experience, because it's what I know. But I'm always talking about the human condition, what human beings feel and how we feel. Given these circumstances, a human being will react this way: he'll be happy, will weep, will celebrate, will fall. So my books are popular in Asia, in Africa, in Europe. Why would I, a black girl in the South, fall in love with Tolstoy or Dickens? I was Danton and Madame Defarge and all those people in A Tale of Two Cities. I was Daphne du Maurier and the Brontë sisters in a town where blacks were not allowed to cross the street. I was educated by those writers. Not about themselves and their people, but about me, what I could hope for.
- Maya Angelou. From a 1983 interview transcribed in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

The seed of the story [Rebecca] lay in du Maurier’s jealousy of Jan Ricardo, the first fiancée of her husband. "I know that she came across one or two letters or cards, fairly sort of harmless things, where Jan did sign 'Jan Ricardo' with this wonderful great R," says Browning, flourishing his hand in the air. It is a portentous curlicue that is emulated in the book.
- Christian House quoting de Maurier's son, Christian "Kits" Browning, in The Daily Telegraph (August 2013)^[2]