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" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Who
Stranger
Seize
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" 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
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Right
" Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion. "
Lionel Shriver
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Will
" 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
" In Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America's first planned communities, order and harmony are prized. "
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Heights
America
Harmony
" What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away. "
Lionel Shriver
Purpose
Good
Does
" 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
" Ultimately, Hillary and Obama are on the same side. "
Lionel Shriver
Same
Ultimately
Side
" A smaller waist is not the solution to all your problems. "
Lionel Shriver
Your
Problems
Smaller
" For the left-leaning, political identity is liable to be closely intertwined with personal identity. The left is collusive, if not presumptuous: should you get on well with leftists at a party, they will blithely assume that you share the same views on the invasion of Iraq, even if all you've talked about is the canapes. "
Lionel Shriver
You
Identity
Party
" Ironically, heavier comedians, actors, and the characters they play are actually more sympathetic, and easier for audiences to identify with, than the svelte. "
Lionel Shriver
Play
More
Easier
" 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
" 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
" 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
" At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity. "
Lionel Shriver
Keyboard
People
Feelings
" In the big picture, few of our careers live up to the dreams we nursed when we were young. In fact, one underside of success is that it's nearly always penultimate, and so every accomplishment merely raises the bar. "
Lionel Shriver
Dreams
Accomplishment
Success
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Publishers like their authors to take advantage of publicity opportunities. "
Lionel Shriver
Opportunities
Like
Take Advantage
" While one can't always begrudge the wealth of people who have at least produced something of value, the rich of the financial world don't make anything but more money. They're not creative, aside from, perhaps, in accounting. "
Lionel Shriver
World
Value
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
" 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. "
Lionel Shriver
Never
Vision
Place
" Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare. "
Lionel Shriver
Because
Like
Well
" In the public mind, an investment banker is no longer conservative; he's a risk taker, a gambler in high stakes, not to mention a thief. These people are dangerous - deliciously so. "
Lionel Shriver
Mind
People
Risk
" 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
" 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
More
Grow Up
Parents
" 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
" Beauty is aspirational - an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain. "
Lionel Shriver
Beauty
Seldom
Mortals