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Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.
Claire Messud -
There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.
Claire Messud
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I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and under-linings they are irreplaceable, but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish.
Claire Messud -
There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so.
Claire Messud -
I actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson.
Claire Messud -
As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.
Claire Messud -
I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.
Claire Messud -
Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.'
Claire Messud
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The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'
Claire Messud -
The way I saw the world as a child was not wrong. And it's okay to see the world that way. If it doesn't hurt anybody.
Claire Messud -
In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.
Claire Messud -
The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.
Claire Messud -
We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.
Claire Messud -
I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
Claire Messud
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If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.
Claire Messud -
If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.
Claire Messud -
In midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck.
Claire Messud -
Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.
Claire Messud -
If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.
Claire Messud -
I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.
Claire Messud
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I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last.
Claire Messud -
I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.
Claire Messud -
If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am.
Claire Messud -
To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.
Claire Messud