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" 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. "

Claire Messud

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" In the world I've lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don't live in that world. "

" If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. "

" 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. "

Claire Messud

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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. "

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

Claire Messud

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Potential

" 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. "

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

" Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, 'My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?' "

" I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, 'You get an A-minus for your life.' And it's not true. It's not true. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? "

" 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. "

" As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men. "

" Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions. "

" We think that we know people from this constellation of points: 'I know that story. I know that girl. I've heard that story a thousand times.' But actually, you never know that story. "

" If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human. "

" 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. "

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

" I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think. "

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I wish I were a really good photographer. "

" There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so. "

" 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. "

" 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. "