394 Quotes by Lionel Shriver

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

Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water.

We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats – including sombreros.

Incredibly, the self-starved never appear capable of taking any pleasure in the very vessel for which they’ve sacrificed.

Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.

But one of the things you lose in the wisdom of age is the wisdom of youth. Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain...

Like most disguises, the cover-up was worse than honest flaw, a lesson I had yet to register on my own account.

And there’s an ownership to destruction, an intimacy: an appropriation.

I didn’t care about anything. And there’s a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.