Claire Messud Quotes
If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know.
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Quotes to Explore
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Reading allows me to recharge my batteries.
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In my opinion, all relationships between people have some sort of violence, and it is central.
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Beauty products always cheer me up and give me hope. If it makes you feel pretty, why not?
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I struggled with being a broke college graduate, and while all my friends were getting career jobs, I was working horrible part-time jobs. That's why now, even when I get tired, I think, 'This is what I asked for.'
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We're living at a time where if you do a Google search for a 'show, review and network,' you'll get 'The New York Times' and Pete Billingsley from a town you've never heard of on the same results page. It's kind of democratizing the process so that everyone has access to a distribution system to express themselves.
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I loved London. In the 1970s... it was very exciting, really wild.
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Playing Juliet in 'Heavenly Creatures' changed my life, and the role of Clementine in' Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' opened many new doors creatively.
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I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.
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To be successful in struggle requires remembrance of the Creator and the doing of good deeds. This is important because successful struggle demands that there be a kind of social consciousness.
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The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.
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Only very brave mouse makes nest in cat's ear.
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The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.
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Panic is a horrible thing.
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I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?
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Fighting bitterness can be a full-time job.
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But I have had the luxury of working on good films with great people.
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Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.
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I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
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I started playing mandolin when I was three or four years old because I was too small to be playing guitar. As I got older and more responsible with holding instruments, I was allowed to play my mom's guitar that she had.
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When I'm talking to somebody, I'll put a piece of paper on the table and I'll write what I call a conversation summary - notes about the conversation on the piece of paper. At the end of the conversation, I'll take a picture on my phone and give the other person the original piece of paper.
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I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree and climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
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Ever since I've been 16, 15, that's all I've been doing: playing darts.
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A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
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If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know.