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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? "
Claire Messud
Experience
You
Truth Is
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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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" 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. "
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" Place and displacement have always been central for me. A type of insecurity goes with that: you are always following the cues, like learning the dance steps when the dance is already under way. "
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" An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.' "
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" I digress a lot - it's how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity. "
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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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" As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants. "
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" I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and under-linings they are irreplaceable, but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish. "
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" 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. "
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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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" 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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" I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider. "
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" In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them. "
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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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" Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch. "
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" Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world. "
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" There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so. "
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" Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.' "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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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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" The Strauss allowed me to be a writer. Without it, 'The Emperor's Children' would not exist. When I received the award, I was teaching, had one baby, and was pregnant with another. There was no time for writing. "
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" 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. "
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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. "
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" The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?' "
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