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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The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'
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If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.
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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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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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We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.
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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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I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.
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If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.
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Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.
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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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I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
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I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.
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For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will?
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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 wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.