Claire Messud Quotes
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I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition.
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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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Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch.
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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.
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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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It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that.
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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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As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.
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I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.
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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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As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.
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We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
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The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'
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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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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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For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.