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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Claire Messud

Experience

Thoughts

Unexpected

" I'd wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself. "

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

" We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else. "

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

" Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all. "

" 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

" We read to find life, in all its possibilities. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

Claire Messud

People

Hurricane

" If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. "

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

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

" If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible. "

" My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family. "

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

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

" The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling. "

" 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 wish I were a really good photographer. "

" It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that. "

" Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives. "

" For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite. "

Claire Messud

Find

Future

" I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback. "

" 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. "

" I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea. "

" 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. "