Claire Messud Quotes
If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.

Quotes to Explore
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After the success of my first album and the success of 'Flow Joe' kind of faded, I was struggling to make some money and make ends meet.
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My boy and I move. We have this game where if we dress in a particular item of clothing, we have to do a different movement. A hat means 20 jumps - that sort of thing. When I put a scarf on, my son has to drop down and do push-ups, immediately. He thinks it's really funny.
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The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer.
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You get tough when you grow up unloved. People described me as a boyish girl - rather shy, but I didn't show it. I had an attitude. I was rather wild. I lied a lot because I knew the alternative was to be punished. As I got older I realised I didn't have to lie any more and it was a nice feeling. I could be myself.
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Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.
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The poorer people and criminals of Mexico who are not very religious but not quite atheists, either, worship Saint Death.
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The best time to expand is when people are asleep at the wheel.
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To be on the set with the actors, with the location, every day changes; every day something can go wrong.
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Writing for children, you do bear a responsibility to not include overt or graphic adult content that they are not ready for and don't need, or to address adult concepts or themes from an oblique angle or a child's limited viewpoint, with appropriate context, without being graphic or distressing.
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All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
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After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.
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I think there is one higher office than president and I would call that patriot.
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Homecourt is everything in the NBA.
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A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.
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No one goes into the office for fun. You go, and even if you love it, you're there to work.
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People have given me the freedom and believe in me enough to say if I want to do these things that I will find a way to make it work. I don't know if they think I'm crazy, drug damaged or just an old weirdo.
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Everyone is just nicer to prettier people.
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A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.
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I'm fighting not only for myself and for my family, but I feel I am fighting for everybody who has cancer.
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You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.
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The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered.
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I wrote that letter, and the one to Nixon. And I wrote more letters, and I thought it might be a magazine article. At that time I sent it to Esquire and Playboy, but anyway, I kept writing, and all of sudden I had enough and thought, well maybe it is a book.
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I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life.
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If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.