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" A pre-nup is an insurance policy or, in brokerage terms, a short hedge - meant to mitigate a high-risk investment. It safeguards the love-struck from their own poor judgment of character. "
Lionel Shriver
Short
Investment
Insurance
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" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Sacrifice
Say
Determination
" In the perfect world, no one would need pre-nups. But all too often, a misty-eyed romancer at the altar transforms into a vengeful, avaricious fiscal predator when the marriage goes south. "
Lionel Shriver
Predator
World
Marriage
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Girl
Mother
Decision
" Happiness isn't a position. It's a trajectory. "
Lionel Shriver
Trajectory
Position
Happiness
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Famous
I Am
People
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
World
Child
Childhood
" I guess I understand a public intellectual to be somebody who moves public discourse forward: someone who either says something new or says something that everybody knows to be true but is afraid to express. "
Lionel Shriver
True
Intellectual
Forward
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
I Am
Different
Up
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Reform
Off
May
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Game
Own
World
" Overly vigorous investigations of ominously ill-defined 'bullying' can themselves constitute a form of bullying. "
Lionel Shriver
Themselves
Vigorous
Form
" As a woman, I'd be uneasy about being given the power to determine what is insulting to women in general. "
Lionel Shriver
Woman
Women
General
" The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started. "
Lionel Shriver
Finish
Started
Book
" We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans. "
Lionel Shriver
Speak
Planet
Mean
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Superior
Spoiled
Way
" A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum. "
Lionel Shriver
Something
Always
Only
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Argument
Parents
Mother
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Powerful
Control
Best
" 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? "
Lionel Shriver
Happiness
Independence
Right
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
She
Me
World
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Character
Wife
Airport
" Beauty is aspirational - an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain. "
Lionel Shriver
Beauty
Seldom
Mortals
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Rest
Book
Film
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Suffering
Fault
Shine
" Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity. "
Lionel Shriver
Self-Pity
Emotion
Life
" I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done. "
Lionel Shriver
Done
Born
Work
" Most books are three-thirds rubbish. "
Lionel Shriver
Books
Rubbish
Most
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Honest
Thoughtful
Meaning
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Mirror
Above
Ugly
" Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling. "
Lionel Shriver
Life
Fashion
Down