- Childhood
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- Nov 07, 2020
Lionel Shriver Quotes
Most Famous Lionel Shriver Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Shine
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Dine
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- Nov 07, 2020
The sign that I don't like the book I'm reading is finding myself watching reruns of 'Come Dine With Me.'
- End
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- Nov 07, 2020
Hungry for both fantasy and inspiration, readers crave protagonists who, after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, triumph at the end of the day.
- Live
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the big picture, few of our careers live up to the dreams we nursed when we were young. In fact, one underside of success is that it's nearly always penultimate, and so every accomplishment merely raises the bar.
- Daily Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.
- Face
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Media
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Heavier
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- Nov 07, 2020
Ironically, heavier comedians, actors, and the characters they play are actually more sympathetic, and easier for audiences to identify with, than the svelte.
- Opportunities
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- Nov 07, 2020
Publishers like their authors to take advantage of publicity opportunities.
- Most
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- Nov 07, 2020
Most women work not from yearning for fulfilment but yearning to pay the mortgage.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
'The Feminine Mystique' goads me to gratitude that, thanks to forerunners like Betty Friedan, I've had the opportunity to pursue a career.
- Opportunity
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Economics
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- First
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- Nov 07, 2020
In Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America's first planned communities, order and harmony are prized.
- Free
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Feelings
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- Nov 07, 2020
At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.
- Power
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- Nov 07, 2020
As a woman, I'd be uneasy about being given the power to determine what is insulting to women in general.
- Hell
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- Nov 07, 2020
Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.
- Most
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- Nov 07, 2020
Most books are three-thirds rubbish.
- Pleases
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- Nov 07, 2020
Reality doesn't have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases.
- Donald Trump
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020
A Trump presidency feels as if we've crawled between the covers of a really crummy book.
- Alone
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Mean
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- Nov 07, 2020
We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.
- Nov 07, 2020
I'm not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us.
- Exchanging
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Own
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
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!'
- He
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- Nov 07, 2020
Trump is not charismatic. He is artless and politically clumsy and wears his egotism on his sleeve.
- Grammatical
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- Nov 07, 2020
Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.
- Left
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Constitute
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- Nov 07, 2020
Overly vigorous investigations of ominously ill-defined 'bullying' can themselves constitute a form of bullying.
- Nov 07, 2020
Hypersensitivity has become a weapon.
- Control
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Grow
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Church
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- Nov 07, 2020
The daughter of an ordained minister, I had been forced to go to church since I was a toddler. I hated church and resented being forced to recite the Apostle's Creed, mumbling, 'I believe... ' when I didn't.
- Economics
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Financiers
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- High
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Political
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- Nov 07, 2020
For the left-leaning, political identity is liable to be closely intertwined with personal identity. The left is collusive, if not presumptuous: should you get on well with leftists at a party, they will blithely assume that you share the same views on the invasion of Iraq, even if all you've talked about is the canapes.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Only
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- Nov 07, 2020
Conservative supporters might either have the courage of their convictions or, if truly ashamed, revise them, but they should at least refute the proposition that defending your own interests is only acceptable if you're broke.
- Being
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Experience
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- Nov 07, 2020
Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion.
- Control
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Children
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Decision
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Enshrined
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- Nov 07, 2020
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?
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.
- Position
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- Nov 07, 2020