Lionel Shriver Quotes
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For the left-leaning, political identity is liable to be closely intertwined with personal identity. The left is collusive, if not presumptuous: should you get on well with leftists at a party, they will blithely assume that you share the same views on the invasion of Iraq, even if all you've talked about is the canapes.
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During the protracted tooth-and-nail tussle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, I was one of those fierce partisans desperate for the first black candidate with a serious shot at the White House to win the nomination.
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We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.
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For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
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Criminality being partially preordained may seem to let culprits off the hook. Yet it also makes the proclivity seem ineradicable and suggests that reform is unlikely: once a baddie, always a baddie.
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In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
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Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity.
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Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell.
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Certainly, critics are not all created equal.
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What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.
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Trump is not charismatic. He is artless and politically clumsy and wears his egotism on his sleeve.
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Most books are three-thirds rubbish.
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A Trump presidency feels as if we've crawled between the covers of a really crummy book.
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Conservative supporters might either have the courage of their convictions or, if truly ashamed, revise them, but they should at least refute the proposition that defending your own interests is only acceptable if you're broke.
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As a woman, I'd be uneasy about being given the power to determine what is insulting to women in general.
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Hungry for both fantasy and inspiration, readers crave protagonists who, after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, triumph at the end of the day.
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Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.
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In the big picture, few of our careers live up to the dreams we nursed when we were young. In fact, one underside of success is that it's nearly always penultimate, and so every accomplishment merely raises the bar.
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Set a good example as parents, since the most convincing argument that a girl can become a computer coder is that her mother is one.
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In the public mind, an investment banker is no longer conservative; he's a risk taker, a gambler in high stakes, not to mention a thief. These people are dangerous - deliciously so.
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As a child, I was always a sucker for anything in miniature, and it didn't have to be a dress: a desk, a Matchbox truck. Perhaps a childhood attraction to shrunken but compellingly realistic facsimiles is commonplace, if only because children themselves are compellingly realistic facsimiles of the giants who rule their world.
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Over my lifetime, heavy usage has woefully eroded profanity's power.
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Authors are free to ignore their editors' advice. I often avail myself of this veto power - sometimes out of a pigheadedness for which I'll pay the price.
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At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.