Claire Messud Quotes
-
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.'
-
Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.
-
The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.
-
In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.
-
If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.
-
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.
-
I'd wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself.
-
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.
-
If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so.
-
It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that.
-
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.
-
We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
-
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.
-
To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.
-
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.
-
If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.
-
We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.