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For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite.
Claire Messud -
I don't trust people who are likable.
Claire Messud
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Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about.
Claire Messud -
The Strauss allowed me to be a writer. Without it, 'The Emperor's Children' would not exist. When I received the award, I was teaching, had one baby, and was pregnant with another. There was no time for writing.
Claire Messud -
I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.'
Claire Messud -
We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else.
Claire Messud -
I was in my senior year of high school when I read 'Notes From Underground' by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn't known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way.
Claire Messud -
Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.
Claire Messud
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My tendencies are much more the Henry James thing, where we sit in silence at the table for three minutes, and our whole lives are changed because of a revelation that never quite happens but almost bubbles to the surface.
Claire Messud -
I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.
Claire Messud -
I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition.
Claire Messud -
For me, the ages between 9 and 12 were great because it was before you wore any masks, and you had some autonomy in the world. You had some freedom, and you felt you had unlimited ambition. It's when you thought, 'I'm going to write plays. I'm going to be president. I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that.' And then it all falls apart.
Claire Messud -
I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things.
Claire Messud -
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.
Claire Messud
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This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore.
Claire Messud -
As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.
Claire Messud -
For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.
Claire Messud -
I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.
Claire Messud -
We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
Claire Messud -
When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a - frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it.
Claire Messud
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I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.
Claire Messud -
If you live in a family or have five roommates, there's some sort of reality check, but when you live alone, there's a lot more leeway for your fantasy life to be more and more a part of your everyday life.
Claire Messud -
Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.
Claire Messud -
There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.
Claire Messud