American - Novelist | 1966 -
As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.
Claire Messud
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I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.
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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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Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren't the world.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.
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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.
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I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.
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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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For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will?
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