Quotes from Lionel Shriver

Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty. More concerned with what is put than how it is put, she also understood that you only say anything at all when you say it well.

Reality doesn't have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases.

Clearly, freedom does not extend to the right to harm other people.

Ultimately, Hillary and Obama are on the same side.

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.

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!'

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.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

You can't be stylish and petty at the same time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Though a fine writer, Scott Spencer will forever be associated with a cheesy, sentimental film starring the vapid box-office draw Brooke Shields.

Writers who take on polarising issues are apt to step on a few toes.

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.

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.

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.

The sign that I don't like the book I'm reading is finding myself watching reruns of 'Come Dine With Me.'

Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.

I think Britain is a little better at bringing intellectuals into discourse than America, where I'm from. Though I would say, perhaps, that the U.K. prefers its intellectualism to be entertaining.

Most women work not from yearning for fulfilment but yearning to pay the mortgage.

Happiness isn't a position. It's a trajectory.

Ever since Hiroshima, we've been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.