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" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Easier

" We probably give newspaper columnists too much weight. "

" Formal declarations of mistrust, pre-nups are emotionally unfortunate. They overtly plan for failure, and thus involve a jarring cognitive dissonance. "

" Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Most books are three-thirds rubbish. "

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

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

Lionel Shriver

His

Egotism

" I have buckets of sympathy for the obese, often subject to cruelty, ridicule, denunciation, and contempt. "

" During the protracted tooth-and-nail tussle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, I was one of those fierce partisans desperate for the first black candidate with a serious shot at the White House to win the nomination. "

" I was terrified of growing up to become the anti-me, maturing into a woman whom I would not recognise and who wouldn't recognise her younger self. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Few Amazon punters will explore a book with the depth of an 800-word review. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Ultimately, Hillary and Obama are on the same side. "