Claire Messud Quotes
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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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I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last.
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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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For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.
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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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If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am.
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I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.
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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 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?