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At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver -
We probably give newspaper columnists too much weight.
Lionel Shriver -
Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.
Lionel Shriver -
Reality doesn't have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases.
Lionel Shriver -
I'm not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us.
Lionel Shriver -
I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver -
Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare.
Lionel Shriver -
Writers who take on polarising issues are apt to step on a few toes.
Lionel Shriver -
Ironically, heavier comedians, actors, and the characters they play are actually more sympathetic, and easier for audiences to identify with, than the svelte.
Lionel Shriver -
Clearly, freedom does not extend to the right to harm other people.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing.
Lionel Shriver -
Few Amazon punters will explore a book with the depth of an 800-word review.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
While one can't always begrudge the wealth of people who have at least produced something of value, the rich of the financial world don't make anything but more money. They're not creative, aside from, perhaps, in accounting.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
In my teens, I eyed my adulthood with trepidation, as if stalked by a stranger - one who would seize control as if by demonic possession and regard my fledgling incarnation with contempt.
Lionel Shriver