Quotes from Lionel Shriver

We probably give newspaper columnists too much weight.

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.

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

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.

At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.

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.

Over my lifetime, heavy usage has woefully eroded profanity's power.

The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.

Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

The secret is that there is no secret.

The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.

Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.

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

some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.

It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.

A boy is a dangerous animal.

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

Everything people do that doesn't work has to be somebody else's fault. Next time you know, geezers'll be suing the government for getting old and kids'll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.