Claire Messud Quotes
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I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.
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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.
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I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.
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For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.
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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.
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I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.
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Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.'
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I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
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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.
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Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.
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If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.
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The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.
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I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada.
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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.
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I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.
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I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.