Lionel Shriver Quotes
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As a teenager, I ached to grow up even more than I dreaded to. I craved escape from my parents' impositions on what I believed.
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Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.
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I do occasionally encounter a British business that delivers what and when, and for exactly the price, they promised. But commercial paragons in the U.K. are rare.
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February is for curmudgeons, whinge-bags, and misanthropes. You can't begrudge us one month of the year or blame us for being even crabbier, it's so short. There is nothing good about it, which is why it's so great.
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Some of the best scenes in drama take almost no time - helping to illustrate that life-changing events in real life often occur in a split second, after which nothing is ever the same.
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I can't be alone among fiction writers in regarding the world, so much weirder than anything we could make up, as beating us at our own game or in racking my brains over what could possibly constitute a contribution when novels pale before the newspaper.
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I have buckets of sympathy for the obese, often subject to cruelty, ridicule, denunciation, and contempt.
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When we conceive of happiness as a static state, effectively a place toward which we are aimed but at which most of us will never feel we've quite arrived, then the vision becomes exclusionary.
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As individuals are best off believing they control their behaviour, the judiciary is best off imputing that control - barring powerful extenuating factors such as mental illness.
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A pre-nup is an insurance policy or, in brokerage terms, a short hedge - meant to mitigate a high-risk investment. It safeguards the love-struck from their own poor judgment of character.
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The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.
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Beauty is aspirational - an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain.
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When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss.
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'The Feminine Mystique' goads me to gratitude that, thanks to forerunners like Betty Friedan, I've had the opportunity to pursue a career.
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A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.
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We vainly fancy ourselves above the ugly informing and paranoia of the right-wing McCarthy era, but in the 21st century, the Left has fashioned a mirror image.
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The sign that I don't like the book I'm reading is finding myself watching reruns of 'Come Dine With Me.'
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Tory supporters are not spontaneously ashamed; they have been made to feel ashamed. British leftists fiercely believe they are right - in the sense of correct but also in the sense of just. Conservatives likewise believe they are right-as-in-correct. Yet Tories are less confident about whether their politics are right-as-in-just.
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A smaller waist is not the solution to all your problems.
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Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion.
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In the perfect world, no one would need pre-nups. But all too often, a misty-eyed romancer at the altar transforms into a vengeful, avaricious fiscal predator when the marriage goes south.
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I read 'The Bell Jar' as an adolescent and, like most teenagers, had no problem identifying with a young woman who had everything going for her - looks, talent, opportunity, with her 'whole life ahead of her,' yadda, yadda, yadda - yet was spiraling into misery.
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Most women work not from yearning for fulfilment but yearning to pay the mortgage.
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In economics, 'competitiveness' does not describe Barack Obama's insistence on not only being president of the U.S. but also beating his staff at bowling.