Lionel Shriver

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

— Lionel Shriver

I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

“It's as if your money, by conceit inexhaustible, isn't real, so your generosity isn't real, either.”

— Lionel Shriver

Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.

— Lionel Shriver

The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.

— Lionel Shriver

“Great American Novel” = ”doorstop of a book, usually pretentious, written by a man.”

— Lionel Shriver

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

“The gap between most people’s capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it when they see it is the…

— Lionel Shriver

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere…

— Lionel Shriver

It was important to me to put together a future history that would scan, and serve as the backdrop to the domestic…

— Lionel Shriver

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray…

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to…

— Lionel Shriver

Awful film adaptations follow novelists for the rest of their lives. An atrocious movie of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' could…

— Lionel Shriver

“I'd get this, I luuuuuuuv you, buddy! stuff, and I'd just look at him like, Who are you talking to, guy? What…

— Lionel Shriver

“I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but…

— Lionel Shriver

“His weight makes him a social pariah. It reduces the likelihood he’ll remarry. It has grave implications for his health. But it…

— Lionel Shriver

“So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree,…

— Lionel Shriver

“I didn't put in my diaphragm' I mumbled when we were through. You stirred, 'Is it dangerous?' 'It's very dangerous,' I said.…

— Lionel Shriver

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…

— Lionel Shriver

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely…

— Lionel Shriver

“Still, I may have been glad to scratch the dry surface of our day-to-day peaceableness the way Violetta had clawed the sere…

— Lionel Shriver

“How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?”

— Lionel Shriver

“[T]he cardboard bookcase of her character had already collapsed under the strain.”

— Lionel Shriver

As a woman, I'd be uneasy about being given the power to determine what is insulting to women in general.

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

“Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket.”

— Lionel Shriver

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .

— Lionel Shriver

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.

— Lionel Shriver

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

— Lionel Shriver

Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.

— Lionel Shriver

“A obstinação pura e simples é mais durável que a coragem, embora não seja tão”

— Lionel Shriver

Ever since Hiroshima, we've been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.

— Lionel Shriver

I have never in all my life considered you other people.

— Lionel Shriver

People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver