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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We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.
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As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that.
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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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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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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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As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.
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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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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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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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If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.
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We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
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To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.
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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 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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We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.