Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss. "

Lionel Shriver

Only

Off

Free

Related Quotes:

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

Lionel Shriver

Chances

Universe

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We probably give newspaper columnists too much weight. "

" Most books are three-thirds rubbish. "

" In Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America's first planned communities, order and harmony are prized. "

" Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity. "

" 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. "

" As any traveller knows, heading elsewhere is one thing, getting back quite another. "

" What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away. "

" 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. "

" The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started. "

" Writers who take on polarising issues are apt to step on a few toes. "

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

" Beauty is aspirational - an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain. "

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

" 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. "

" Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion. "

" 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. "

" Overly vigorous investigations of ominously ill-defined 'bullying' can themselves constitute a form of bullying. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Certainly, critics are not all created equal. "

" 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. "

" 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