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" 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
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" I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback. "
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" What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between? "
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" I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives. "
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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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" To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me. "
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" We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly. "
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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. "
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" We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it. "
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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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" 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. "
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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. "
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" 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. "
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" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "
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" At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for. "
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" You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift. "
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" I wish I were a really good photographer. "
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" In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety. "
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" Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions. "
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" 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. "
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" Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine. "
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" 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 had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play. "
Claire Messud
Lines
Play
School
" 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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" If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be. "
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" The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling. "
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" 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. "
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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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" 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!' "
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Sleep
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" I've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? "
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Project
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" 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. "
Claire Messud
Hope
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