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In the era of Venus Williams, girliness and goo isn't the way to every woman's heart. Yet publishers presume that women only buy a book that looks soft and that appears to be all about women, even if it isn't. Yet women, unlike men, buy books by and about both sexes.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
The sign that I don't like the book I'm reading is finding myself watching reruns of 'Come Dine With Me.'
Lionel Shriver -
In Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America's first planned communities, order and harmony are prized.
Lionel Shriver -
I owe thanks to a thoughtful, sophisticated readership hungry for challenging subject matter, for honest portrayals of parenthood, and for fiction whose meaning is neither obvious nor morally pat.
Lionel Shriver -
Beauty is aspirational - an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain.
Lionel Shriver
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I have buckets of sympathy for the obese, often subject to cruelty, ridicule, denunciation, and contempt.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.
Lionel Shriver -
Hypersensitivity has become a weapon.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.
Lionel Shriver
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Overly vigorous investigations of ominously ill-defined 'bullying' can themselves constitute a form of bullying.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver -
Most women work not from yearning for fulfilment but yearning to pay the mortgage.
Lionel Shriver -
Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver -
Weight having become politicised, anyone with a profile in the media who either subscribes to or departs from the template of tininess implicitly represents a constituency, whether they want to or not.
Lionel Shriver -
A smaller waist is not the solution to all your problems.
Lionel Shriver -
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.
Lionel Shriver