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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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" 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. "

Claire Messud

Fall

Beginning

Son

" 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!' "

" For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will? "

Claire Messud

People

Hurricane

" Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life. "

" 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. "

" 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

" The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?' "

Claire Messud

Alive

Potential

" I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada. "

" 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. "

" For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world. "

" I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world. "

" If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be. "

" Obstruction can be caused by so many factors - perfectionism, distraction, faltering confidence, external demands and pressures. At some point, of course, you've got to push through it all if you're to write, and if you don't, or can't, you're sunk. "

" When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a - frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it. "

" What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between? "

" You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift. "

" I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last. "

" Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.' "

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

" I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had. "

" I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "