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" 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. "

Claire Messud

Live

Best

Friend

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" 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. "

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" In midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck. "

" 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!' "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" For me, the ages between 9 and 12 were great because it was before you wore any masks, and you had some autonomy in the world. You had some freedom, and you felt you had unlimited ambition. It's when you thought, 'I'm going to write plays. I'm going to be president. I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that.' And then it all falls apart. "

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

" My husband had a stalker, briefly. "

Claire Messud

Husband

Had

" 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 grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition. "

Claire Messud

Write

British

" 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. "

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

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

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" When I finish a book, I always fear that I'll never write again. It takes a lot of time. You always think if you could just do something else - but nothing else makes me as happy. "

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

" 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

Story

Try