Lionel Shriver Quotes

I hadn't thought that women were particularly dangerous golfers. Could that be the reason that the Augusta National Golf club refuses to take down its 'No Women Allowed' sign?

There were three football fields next door to my house. I used to walk down to the boys' team, but eventually, I was told I was going to have to stop playing because I was a girl.

But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her

Believe it or not, I don't collaborate with women, though my agent and editor are both females. For the most part, they do little editing on my characters.

I spent most of my career in business not saying the word 'woman.' Because if you say the word 'woman' in a business context, and often in a political context, the person on the other side of the table thinks you're about to sue them or ask for special treatment, right?

I would not like to be the only woman on the court.

Washington and Congress are steeped in history and tradition, and that's been very male-oriented.

In my career I have never felt that my being a woman was an obstacle or an advantage. I guess I've been oblivious.

People put stock in someone being in a 'girl group,' but we don't say that a band is a 'man group.'

There are relatively few role models for young people. We are in a society that is ruled by men.

Gender-dominated environments are not good... particularly in the financial sector where there are too few women. In gender-dominated environments, men have a tendency to... show how hairy chested they are, compared with the man who's sitting next to them. I honestly think that there should never be too much testosterone in one room.

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.

I have a lot of men who will say to me, 'I don't read books by women, but I like you.'

I found in my experiences that it's not that men are consciously discriminating against promoting women, but I do believe as people we have self-images about what's good.

As an agent, I functioned like a guy. But the fact that I was a woman affected everything.

People are always telling me that boys won't go to girls' movies and vice versa. It's not true.

Especially with girls, people always want to put them in little brackets.

Sometimes I try to sell shows with a female lead to networks, and that isn't something that's been a proven formula for them, so they reject it. I do feel like men get the funniest roles in movies.

Female authors were still using male names when I was young, or they were neatly shoehorned into 'women's books' except for those few that men could always point at when the disparity was pointed out.

I'm a girl, so I've experienced dismissal because I was a girl or because I write about girls: my book with a guy protagonist is treated as more literary and worthy than my other books with girl protagonists.

It is a difficult one, as you get scripts where women are just objects.

Books written by boys are given very different treatment to those written by girls: they're even given very different covers. People also expect, in this YA-booming world, girls to be less experimental than boys: girls are achieving a lot of success, but they're confined.

I have never been good at doing impressions of women. Which is understandable. There's a gender issue.

We determine whether a book is for boys or girls long before the reader gets a chance to decide: we package them with soldiers and ballet slippers on their covers, war machines and glittering gowns.

There aren't a lot of female story artists, and it's baffling to me. There are a lot of kids in school that are female and I wonder, 'Where did they all go?' People have brought it up, asking me, 'What did you do?' I don't really know. I puttered along, did my thing and gender has really never been an issue.