“I am bowled over by the massive number of remarkable people who face d...” — Lionel Shriver Quote

“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.”

“When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“God guides us from within. He does nothing more than that. There is no charm in God shaping us like a potter. We are not earthen wares; we are beings full of consciousness.”

“Ultimately, the reason privacy is so vital is it's the realm in which we can do all the things that are valuable as human beings. It's the place that uniquely enables us to explore limits, to test boundaries, to engage in novel and creative ways of thinking and being.”

“If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.”

“I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.”

“We get so swept up in sort of what the media tells us to care about and all these other influences that we really have to dig down deep and figure out what is it that we as human beings really care about and want for ourselves. When you figure that out, you see who you really are.”