Claire Messud Quotes
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I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.
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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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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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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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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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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 have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.
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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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I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.
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I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
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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 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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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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To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.
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I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last.
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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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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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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 always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody.
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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 reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.