Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was terrified of growing up to become the anti-me, maturing into a woman whom I would not recognise and who wouldn't recognise her younger self.
Formal declarations of mistrust, pre-nups are emotionally unfortunate. They overtly plan for failure, and thus involve a jarring cognitive dissonance.
In economics, 'competitiveness' does not describe Barack Obama's insistence on not only being president of the U.S. but also beating his staff at bowling.
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.
Hungry for both fantasy and inspiration, readers crave protagonists who, after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, triumph at the end of the day.
Dieting is odious and can require years of determination and sacrifice. I entirely understand the impulse to say, 'Screw it,' and have another piece of cake.
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.
Ironically, heavier comedians, actors, and the characters they play are actually more sympathetic, and easier for audiences to identify with, than the svelte.
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.
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.
[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.
When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear.
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.
It was important to me to put together a future history that would scan, and serve as the backdrop to the domestic story. Economics is really what drives the plot.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.
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.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
For storytellers, financiers make ideal rogues. The easiest way to make characters unappealing is to make them rich - shorthand for spoiled, picky, superior, and cold-hearted.
However unattractive, pre-nups are at least a way round a law that dictates simply because you love someone and share their bed, that person has a claim on everything you own.
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.
I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.
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.
We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.
The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.
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.
When Mexico enjoys an economic boom while the U.S. is in dire fiscal straights, it seemed perfectly credible that Mexico would not roll out the welcome mat for unemployed Americans.
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.
Some of the best scenes in drama take almost no time - helping to illustrate that life-changing events in real life often occur in a split second, after which nothing is ever the same.
We need to recognise that slowing population growth is one of the most cost-effective and reliable ways of easing pressure on our environment and securing a sustainable future for us all
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.
In my teens, I eyed my adulthood with trepidation, as if stalked by a stranger - one who would seize control as if by demonic possession and regard my fledgling incarnation with contempt.
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.
Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.
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.
I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.
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.
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.
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.
Weight having become politicised, anyone with a profile in the media who either subscribes to or departs from the template of tininess implicitly represents a constituency, whether they want to or not.
I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary.
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.
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.
Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better.
February is for curmudgeons, whinge-bags, and misanthropes. You can't begrudge us one month of the year or blame us for being even crabbier, it's so short. There is nothing good about it, which is why it's so great.
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.
Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.
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.