Words matter. These are the best Lionel Shriver Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Ever since Hiroshima, we’ve been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.
I’m not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us.
I’m sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about ‘Kevin,’ and of course, the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches, I never take a single reader for granted and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh.
Formal declarations of mistrust, pre-nups are emotionally unfortunate. They overtly plan for failure, and thus involve a jarring cognitive dissonance.
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.
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.
I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done.
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.
Hypersensitivity has become a weapon.
Reality doesn’t have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.
Most women work not from yearning for fulfilment but yearning to pay the mortgage.
What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.
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.
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.
Criminality being partially preordained may seem to let culprits off the hook. Yet it also makes the proclivity seem ineradicable and suggests that reform is unlikely: once a baddie, always a baddie.
Over my lifetime, heavy usage has woefully eroded profanity’s power.
During the protracted tooth-and-nail tussle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, I was one of those fierce partisans desperate for the first black candidate with a serious shot at the White House to win the nomination.
The sign that I don’t like the book I’m reading is finding myself watching reruns of ‘Come Dine With Me.’
For pity’s sake, if you don’t take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it’s not the author’s fault. It’s yours.
Set a good example as parents, since the most convincing argument that a girl can become a computer coder is that her mother is one.
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.
Life’s most underrated emotion is self-pity.
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.
I was terrified of growing up to become the anti-me, maturing into a woman whom I would not recognise and who wouldn’t recognise her younger self.
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.
There was a point in the latter 1990s at which, suddenly, every sitcom and drama in sight had to have a gay or lesbian character or couple. That was good news as a voucher of the success of the gay rights movement, but it still grew a bit tiresome: ‘Look at us! Our show is so hip, one of the characters is homosexual!’
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.
In Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America’s first planned communities, order and harmony are prized.
Beauty is aspirational – an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain.
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.
As any traveller knows, heading elsewhere is one thing, getting back quite another.
A Trump presidency feels as if we’ve crawled between the covers of a really crummy book.
Writers who take on polarising issues are apt to step on a few toes.
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.
‘The Feminine Mystique’ goads me to gratitude that, thanks to forerunners like Betty Friedan, I’ve had the opportunity to pursue a career.
A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.
Ultimately, Hillary and Obama are on the same side.
In my country, we’re sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
Though a fine writer, Scott Spencer will forever be associated with a cheesy, sentimental film starring the vapid box-office draw Brooke Shields.
The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started.
I am hopeful that the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.
In the public mind, an investment banker is no longer conservative; he’s a risk taker, a gambler in high stakes, not to mention a thief. These people are dangerous – deliciously so.
Most books are three-thirds rubbish.
The premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s film of ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ at the Cannes film festival provides an apt juncture at which to celebrate the miraculous power – not of film but of fiction. Lo, I have created a monster.
Publishers like their authors to take advantage of publicity opportunities.
Donald Trump wouldn’t work on paper. Obnoxious, crass, boastful, and vulgar, with garish tastes and a Stepford wife – as a fictional character, he’d seem too crudely drawn. Even in a trashy airport thriller, readers wouldn’t buy such a boor as president.
Happiness isn’t a position. It’s a trajectory.
By stereotyping my work’s audience as self-involved and prissy, women-only packaging also insults my readers, who could all testify that trussing up my novels as sweet, girly, and soft is like stuffing a Rottweiler in a dress.
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.
Trump can’t string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.
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.
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.
Laws to protect ‘public health’ are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever.
At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people’s feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.
Awful film adaptations follow novelists for the rest of their lives. An atrocious movie of ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ could have stigmatised the book, aggrieved the novel’s fans, and blighted my reputation forever.
