Claire Messud Quotes
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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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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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I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody.
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I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.
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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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You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.
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We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.
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To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.
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Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.'
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If you live in a family or have five roommates, there's some sort of reality check, but when you live alone, there's a lot more leeway for your fantasy life to be more and more a part of your everyday life.
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I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and under-linings they are irreplaceable, but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish.
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The way I saw the world as a child was not wrong. And it's okay to see the world that way. If it doesn't hurt anybody.
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In midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck.
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If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know.
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Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.
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I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
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Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.
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I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.
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The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.
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Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.
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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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I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.
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If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.
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For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will?