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" As any traveller knows, heading elsewhere is one thing, getting back quite another. "
Lionel Shriver
Knows
Back
Getting
Related Quotes:
" 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
" What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away. "
Lionel Shriver
Purpose
Good
Does
" We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans. "
Lionel Shriver
Speak
Planet
Mean
" Authors are free to ignore their editors' advice. I often avail myself of this veto power - sometimes out of a pigheadedness for which I'll pay the price. "
Lionel Shriver
Free
Power
Advice
" 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
" Trump is not charismatic. He is artless and politically clumsy and wears his egotism on his sleeve. "
Lionel Shriver
He
His
Egotism
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Need
Talk
Film
" 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
" Reality doesn't have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases. "
Lionel Shriver
Reality
Plausible
Pleases
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
You
Life
Time
" I'm not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us. "
Lionel Shriver
Chances
Us
Universe
" Happiness isn't a position. It's a trajectory. "
Lionel Shriver
Trajectory
Position
Happiness
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Life
You
Character
" 'The Feminine Mystique' goads me to gratitude that, thanks to forerunners like Betty Friedan, I've had the opportunity to pursue a career. "
Lionel Shriver
Like
Career
Opportunity
" 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
" Though a fine writer, Scott Spencer will forever be associated with a cheesy, sentimental film starring the vapid box-office draw Brooke Shields. "
Lionel Shriver
Writer
Will
Film
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Either
Profile
Become
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Last
Trade
Bad
" 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
" Ever since Hiroshima, we've been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something. "
Lionel Shriver
Depressing
Been
You
" February is for curmudgeons, whinge-bags, and misanthropes. You can't begrudge us one month of the year or blame us for being even crabbier, it's so short. There is nothing good about it, which is why it's so great. "
Lionel Shriver
You
Great
Nothing
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Control
Economics
Enough
" Writers who take on polarising issues are apt to step on a few toes. "
Lionel Shriver
Toes
Step
Take
" Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion. "
Lionel Shriver
Experience
Illusion
Will
" The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started. "
Lionel Shriver
Finish
Started
Book
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Heart
Women
Woman
" 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
" Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography. "
Lionel Shriver
Autobiography
Too
Write
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Work
Dress
Audience
" However unattractive, pre-nups are at least a way round a law that dictates simply because you love someone and share their bed, that person has a claim on everything you own. "
Lionel Shriver
Someone
Law
You