Claire Messud Quotes
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As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.
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If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.
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To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.
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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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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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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 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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We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
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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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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 always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.'
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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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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'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.
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You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.
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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 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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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'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.
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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.
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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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I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
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I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.