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" As any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we'd planned. "

Claire Messud

Circumstances

Ship

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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. "

" To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me. "

Claire Messud

Down

Things

" 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. "

" I remember going to a son's friend's bar mitzvah, and the text that he chose to explicate was right at the beginning of Genesis. It was not about a fall from grace or a fall from perfection; it was about an awakening into consciousness, which is what it means to be human. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Claire Messud

Find

Person

" Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren't the world. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't trust people who are likable. "

" 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!' "

" 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. "

" We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it. "

" In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them. "

" I wish I were a really good photographer. "

" Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history. "

" When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now. "

" 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. "

" I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch. "

" The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art. "

" At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for. "

" 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.' "

" I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.' "

" 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. "

" You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do. "

" 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. "