Quotes from Lionel Shriver

Most books are three-thirds rubbish.

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.

Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion.

The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started.

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.

A smaller waist is not the solution to all your problems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare.

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

It was important to me to put together a future history that would scan, and serve as the backdrop to the domestic story. Economics is really what drives the plot.

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.

The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.

Ironically, heavier comedians, actors, and the characters they play are actually more sympathetic, and easier for audiences to identify with, than the svelte.

I have buckets of sympathy for the obese, often subject to cruelty, ridicule, denunciation, and contempt.

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.

Hypersensitivity has become a weapon.

Trump is not charismatic. He is artless and politically clumsy and wears his egotism on his sleeve.

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.

Certainly, critics are not all created equal.

Publishers like their authors to take advantage of publicity opportunities.

Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water.