Claire Messud Quotes
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You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.
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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 had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
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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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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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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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I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.
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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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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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You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift.
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The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.
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What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?