Claire Messud Quotes
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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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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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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 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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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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There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.
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I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
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As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.
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I wish I were a really good photographer.
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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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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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In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them.
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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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The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'
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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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I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.'
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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 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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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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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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Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.
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For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will?