Claire Messud Quotes
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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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You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.
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If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.
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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 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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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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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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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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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 wish I were a really good photographer.
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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'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.
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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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We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.
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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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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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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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I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
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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 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.