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Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine.
Claire Messud -
In the world I've lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don't live in that world.
Claire Messud
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There is that time right around 30 when you think, your twenties have gone by, and now you really are a grown up, and you do have to figure out what you're going to do.
Claire Messud -
The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things?
Claire Messud -
Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.
Claire Messud -
At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath?
Claire Messud -
I'd wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself.
Claire Messud -
If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.
Claire Messud
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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.
Claire Messud -
The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to those people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.
Claire Messud -
I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had.
Claire Messud -
If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible.
Claire Messud -
When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role.
Claire Messud -
I've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it?
Claire Messud
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We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.
Claire Messud -
For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.
Claire Messud -
A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.
Claire Messud -
It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that.
Claire Messud -
I digress a lot - it's how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity.
Claire Messud -
We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.
Claire Messud
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If people like something you've done - or don't like it - this shouldn't determine what you write or how you write it. Those are two separate things entirely: your work and the world's response to it.
Claire Messud -
The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.
Claire Messud -
An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.'
Claire Messud -
Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch.
Claire Messud