Lionel Shriver Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
I'm married. I've been with my husband for six years. Now that I know what a healthy relationship is, I find I can write better about the unhealthiness of relationships.
-
I've never got into debt and I've always been in control of my taxes and VAT, but having four children costs a lot. They are my weakness.
-
You shouldn't try to manufacture progress.
-
I really enjoy being a dad, and maybe I took it too seriously, but I love being around my kids.
-
I am busier now than I ever imagined I would be, but I feel blessed in that I have found what I am supposed to be doing with my life. It's wonderful to tell stories and have people listen to them.
-
I don't have to be a size zero anymore. But I still want to feel and look good.
-
Estimates of the ionic mobilities vary over a considerable range; but in any event, the positive ionic defect is much more mobile in the solid than in the liquid, and its mobility varies very little with the temperature.
-
I tend to stay with the panic. I embrace the panic.
-
College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.
-
I was always the type of person that whenever I started something I finished it. And, I was always held accountable for my actions.
-
I'm not an overly happy person. There are times when I'm happy, and that's usually in my private life.
-
Looking back, I got the bed I wanted and I lay in it. I didn't want to go to America. If you want to join that world, you have to go and live there, and that was something I could not have done. I am very much about family. It doesn't matter where I live, but I feel very needful of my people around me. Besides, theatre is my first love.
-
Preparing and cooking squid is easier than most fish. The only thing to remember is not to cook it for too long.
-
The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
-
If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
-
I've never set out to teach anyone anything. It's been more of an expression of my views and feelings than sitting down and deciding 'What is today's message?' And I do think that, although I never, again, sat down consciously and thought about this, I do think judging, even for my own daughter, that children respond to that than to 'thought for the day.'
-
Power breeds responsibilities, in international affairs as in domestic - or even private. To dodge or disclaim these responsibilities is one form of the abuse of power.
-
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
-
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-
The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
-
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
-
The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.
-
There are certain artists who have taken it upon themselves to save the world, and I find that gets tiresome. I think the artist's first obligation is to the art, not to the issues . . . I think if I have something to say the best way to do that is just to tell a damn good story.
-
Happiness isn't a position. It's a trajectory.
