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
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 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.
Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare.
Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity.
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.
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.
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.
Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.
There was a point in the latter 1990s at which, suddenly, every sitcom and drama in sight had to have a gay or lesbian character or couple. That was good news as a voucher of the success of the gay rights movement, but it still grew a bit tiresome: 'Look at us! Our show is so hip, one of the characters is homosexual!'
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.
What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.
I guess I understand a public intellectual to be somebody who moves public discourse forward: someone who either says something new or says something that everybody knows to be true but is afraid to express.
Clearly, freedom does not extend to the right to harm other people.
We probably give newspaper columnists too much weight.
A pre-nup is an insurance policy or, in brokerage terms, a short hedge - meant to mitigate a high-risk investment. It safeguards the love-struck from their own poor judgment of character.
I do occasionally encounter a British business that delivers what and when, and for exactly the price, they promised. But commercial paragons in the U.K. are rare.
In grad school, I took a workshop with Scott Spencer, whose excellent novel 'Endless Love' had just been turned into a film. We students were in awe of his prestige. Yet Scott himself was chagrined; for good reason, he hated the movie.
I am hopeful that the concept of 'cultural appropriation' is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.
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.
As a woman, I'd be uneasy about being given the power to determine what is insulting to women in general.
We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.
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 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.
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.
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.
I owe thanks to a thoughtful, sophisticated readership hungry for challenging subject matter, for honest portrayals of parenthood, and for fiction whose meaning is neither obvious nor morally pat.
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.
At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.
Reality doesn't have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases.
Ever since Hiroshima, we've been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.
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.
Publishers like their authors to take advantage of publicity opportunities.
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.
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.
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.
My agent had warned that, while a fine film would do my profile a world of good, a bad one wouldn't help me at all, and I suspected she was soft-pedalling the latter possibility. The effect of a truly execrable adaptation is worse than neutral. The stink rubs off.
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.
Happiness isn't a position. It's a trajectory.
Beauty is aspirational - an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain.
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.
Trump is not charismatic. He is artless and politically clumsy and wears his egotism on his sleeve.
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.
A Trump presidency feels as if we've crawled between the covers of a really crummy book.
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.
'The Feminine Mystique' goads me to gratitude that, thanks to forerunners like Betty Friedan, I've had the opportunity to pursue a career.
Awful film adaptations follow novelists for the rest of their lives. An atrocious movie of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' could have stigmatised the book, aggrieved the novel's fans, and blighted my reputation forever.
In Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America's first planned communities, order and harmony are prized.
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.
Writers who take on polarising issues are apt to step on a few toes.
