Quotes from 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.

A Trump presidency feels as if we've crawled between the covers of a really crummy book.

We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.

Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever.

In Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America's first planned communities, order and harmony are prized.

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.

Few Amazon punters will explore a book with the depth of an 800-word review.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'The Feminine Mystique' goads me to gratitude that, thanks to forerunners like Betty Friedan, I've had the opportunity to pursue a career.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.

I have never in all my life considered you other people.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.

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.