Claire Messud Quotes
I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.
Quotes to Explore
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If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.
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Don't you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?
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The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.
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One of the dreams of Zionism was to be a bridge. Instead, we are creating exclusion between the East and the West instead of creating bridges; we are contributing to the conflict between East and West by our stupid desire to have more.
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Black beans and soy beans are the cornerstones of longevity diets around the world.
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The first drama thing I really got stuck into was 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' I played Puck. That's when I said, 'I want to be an actor.'
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The gravest risks from al Qaeda combine its affinity for big targets and its announced desire for weapons of mass destruction.
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Forget the technique. Hit the guy across from you. Don't let somebody come in your space.
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Moderate doesn't mean that you're a wimp - far from it. It means that you've chosen a path because you believe that's the only way for global harmony and peace.
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One of my favourite exhibitions is called 'Do It,' which I co-curated with the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier 21 years ago.
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When I had my first child, I started to try and make fresh food for him daily, and I became frustrated with the amount of work - and time - involved in making baby food at home.
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It's actually kind of cool that women have taken to me. Because now I have a whole different demographic when it comes to the audiences. I have women who come out and support my movies, and that is a huge demographic for me, which is great because some actors don't have a female base at all.
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It's grueling never knowing if the audience is going to think you're funny. It's soul-destroying when they don't laugh.
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The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
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Once I'm in a situation where I can not do anything for three years and go off the map, I'll focus more on writing. Right now, I want to just make Flume awesome... and big.
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I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.
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Costa Rica, with its tourist-based economy and lack of a national army, has focused on keeping safe its beaches, parks and other public draws. It is one if the safest countries in Central America based on the number of homicides.
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I only know what I read in the papers.
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My family is Chinese-Taiwanese. I'm from Richmond, Virginia. The community in which I grew up was pretty white. The storybooks you got at school featured white children and an animal, or animals, and as you got older, the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs.
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A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true.
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Our goal is to make finance the servant, not the master, of the real economy.
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A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.
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Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.
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I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.
