Lionel Shriver Quotes
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At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.
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I am bowled over by the massive number of remarkable people who face down the fact that no, they are not going to be film directors, famous artists, or billionaire entrepreneurs and still come out the other side as cheerful, decent, gracious human beings.
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Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.
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Reality doesn't have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases.
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We probably give newspaper columnists too much weight.
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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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I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done.
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Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.
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I'm not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us.
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Writers who take on polarising issues are apt to step on a few toes.
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Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare.
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In grad school, I took a workshop with Scott Spencer, whose excellent novel 'Endless Love' had just been turned into a film. We students were in awe of his prestige. Yet Scott himself was chagrined; for good reason, he hated the movie.
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My agent had warned that, while a fine film would do my profile a world of good, a bad one wouldn't help me at all, and I suspected she was soft-pedalling the latter possibility. The effect of a truly execrable adaptation is worse than neutral. The stink rubs off.
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Clearly, freedom does not extend to the right to harm other people.
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Ironically, heavier comedians, actors, and the characters they play are actually more sympathetic, and easier for audiences to identify with, than the svelte.
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The absence of doll babies in my toy chest didn't seriously influence my later decision not to become a mother; rather, I disdained Hasbro's Baby Alive wetting doll because I was already the kind of girl who would grow up to be childless by choice.
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However unattractive, pre-nups are at least a way round a law that dictates simply because you love someone and share their bed, that person has a claim on everything you own.
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Few Amazon punters will explore a book with the depth of an 800-word review.
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Formal declarations of mistrust, pre-nups are emotionally unfortunate. They overtly plan for failure, and thus involve a jarring cognitive dissonance.
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Dieting is odious and can require years of determination and sacrifice. I entirely understand the impulse to say, 'Screw it,' and have another piece of cake.
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For storytellers, financiers make ideal rogues. The easiest way to make characters unappealing is to make them rich - shorthand for spoiled, picky, superior, and cold-hearted.
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Happiness isn't a position. It's a trajectory.
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Ever since Hiroshima, we've been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.
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Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty. More concerned with what is put than how it is put, she also understood that you only say anything at all when you say it well.