Claire Messud Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.
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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.
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Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.
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Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.
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I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.
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I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.'
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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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We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
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As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.
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For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.
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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.
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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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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.
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There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.
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You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.
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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.