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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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" 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. "

Claire Messud

Relatives

Way

Understand

" For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular. "

Claire Messud

Reading

Waste

" 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. "

" I wish I were a really good photographer. "

" 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. "

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives. "

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

Claire Messud

People

Hurricane

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

" As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants. "

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

" 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. "

" We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

" I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play. "

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

" 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. "

" My husband had a stalker, briefly. "

Claire Messud

Husband

Had

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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