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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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

World

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

Lionel Shriver

Grow Up

Parents

" Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell. "

" 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. "

" I'm not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us. "

Lionel Shriver

Chances

Universe

" 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. "

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

" In my teens, I eyed my adulthood with trepidation, as if stalked by a stranger - one who would seize control as if by demonic possession and regard my fledgling incarnation with contempt. "

" Conservative supporters might either have the courage of their convictions or, if truly ashamed, revise them, but they should at least refute the proposition that defending your own interests is only acceptable if you're broke. "

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

" Hypersensitivity has become a weapon. "

Lionel Shriver

Become

Weapon

" 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. "

" Trump is not charismatic. He is artless and politically clumsy and wears his egotism on his sleeve. "

Lionel Shriver

His

Egotism

" Some of the best scenes in drama take almost no time - helping to illustrate that life-changing events in real life often occur in a split second, after which nothing is ever the same. "

" A smaller waist is not the solution to all your problems. "

" I'm sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about 'Kevin,' and of course, the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches, I never take a single reader for granted and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh. "

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

" 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. "

" Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography. "

" 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. "

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

Lionel Shriver

Book

Myself

" 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. "

Lionel Shriver

I Believe

Believe

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

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

" 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!' "