Lionel Shriver Quotes

Author Image

Lionel Shriver

Profession : Journalist

Birth : May 18, 1957

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

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.

Lionel Shriver

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.

Lionel Shriver

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.

Lionel Shriver

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

Lionel Shriver

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

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

Lionel Shriver

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

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

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.

Lionel Shriver

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

A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.

Lionel Shriver

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

Lionel Shriver

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

Lionel Shriver

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

Lionel Shriver

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.

Lionel Shriver

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

Lionel Shriver

Hungry for both fantasy and inspiration, readers crave protagonists who, after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, triumph at the end of the day.

Lionel Shriver

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

Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.

Lionel Shriver