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" As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men. "
Claire Messud
Reader
Always
Men
Related Quotes:
" 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
Work
Two
Did
" I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea. "
Claire Messud
Hardest
Good
Find
" If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge; it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it. "
Claire Messud
Challenge
Impossible
Interesting
" Because we moved so much, I was always having to adapt and work out the lay of the land. So I felt envious of those who did not have to try. "
Claire Messud
Because
Work
Try
" I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives. "
Claire Messud
Complex
Young
People
" 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
Youth
Night
Fall
" 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
Work
World
You
" Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch. "
Claire Messud
Other
Writer
Watch
" 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
Never
Bubbles
Three
" We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly. "
Claire Messud
Illusion
State
Even
" As a kid, I used to tell all these stories. I remember meeting a childhood friend, and we were talking. We remembered that I had made up this story about going to Mars. And she looked at me and said, 'I didn't sleep for a week after that!' "
Claire Messud
Sleep
Childhood
Friend
" 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
Paper
Writing
Words
" 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
Experience
Clarity
Need
" The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling. "
Claire Messud
Women
Young
News
" 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
Time
Writing
Award
" I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody. "
Claire Messud
Always
Enough
Everybody
" 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
Way
Always
Children
" 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
Angry
Woman
Totally
" 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
Heart
Live
Me
" 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
Question
Serious
Go
" Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions. "
Claire Messud
Stuff
High
Emotions
" 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
Feel
Understanding
Think
" When I finish a book, I always fear that I'll never write again. It takes a lot of time. You always think if you could just do something else - but nothing else makes me as happy. "
Claire Messud
Fear
Book
Think
" 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
You
Time
Think
" 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. "
Claire Messud
Life
Writing
Thinking
" I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback. "
Claire Messud
Seek
Writing
Way
" 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
Place
Life
Book
" 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
Truth
Work
Hard Work
" 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
Who
Always
Break
" To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me. "
Claire Messud
Down
Things
Me