Claire Messud Quotes
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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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I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.
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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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Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.
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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.
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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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I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition.
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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.'
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As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.
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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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I'd wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself.
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We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
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If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.
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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'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.
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I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada.
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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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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 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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If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.
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Obstruction can be caused by so many factors - perfectionism, distraction, faltering confidence, external demands and pressures. At some point, of course, you've got to push through it all if you're to write, and if you don't, or can't, you're sunk.
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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 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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We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.