“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.”
― Claire Messud
“Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.”
― Claire Messud
“Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.”
― Claire Messud
“For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn’t get people out on the streets, then what will?”
― Claire Messud
“As any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we’d planned.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that’s who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn’t right: she was ‘hysterical’ or ‘a little unhinged.’ It didn’t have the same sort of connotation at all.”
― Claire Messud
“A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person’s world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.”
― Claire Messud
“The Strauss allowed me to be a writer. Without it, ‘The Emperor’s Children’ would not exist. When I received the award, I was teaching, had one baby, and was pregnant with another. There was no time for writing.”
― Claire Messud
“The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.”
― Claire Messud
“I’m not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don’t seek a wide swath of feedback.”
― Claire Messud
“Yes, writing is essential to me. It’s my way of living in the world.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life – a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to those people somehow transformative. That’s the ideal; that’s always the motivation.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.”
― Claire Messud
“An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story ‘The Lady With the Little Dog.’”
― Claire Messud
“As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.”
― Claire Messud
“I was in my senior year of high school when I read ‘Notes From Underground’ by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn’t known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way.”
― Claire Messud
“For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn’t infinite.”
― Claire Messud
“My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 – when ‘The Female Eunuch’ came out and Ms. magazine was founded – my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family.”
― Claire Messud
“I feel as though there’s a lot invested in my background in being an outsider.”
― Claire Messud
“There is that time right around 30 when you think, your twenties have gone by, and now you really are a grown up, and you do have to figure out what you’re going to do.”
― Claire Messud
“I feel as though there are things that I’m trying to do – you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience – and I’m trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it’s harder than you think.”
― Claire Messud
“My tendencies are much more the Henry James thing, where we sit in silence at the table for three minutes, and our whole lives are changed because of a revelation that never quite happens but almost bubbles to the surface.”
― Claire Messud
“Don’t go around asking the question, ‘Is this character likeable?’ and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That’s not what it’s about.”
― Claire Messud
“My husband had a stalker, briefly.”
― Claire Messud
“We’re all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.”
― Claire Messud
“I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, ‘You get an A-minus for your life.’ And it’s not true. It’s not true.”
― Claire Messud
“If you know what you’re doing, it’s not interesting. It has to be a challenge; it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it.”
― Claire Messud
“We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn’t sit well with any of us. But I think women’s anger sits less well than anything else.”
― Claire Messud
“Women’s anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, ‘My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?’”
― Claire Messud
“I’d wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“It’s still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that.”
― Claire Messud
“If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.”
― Claire Messud
“Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch.”
― Claire Messud
“You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It’s both a loss and a gift.”
― Claire Messud
“When I finish a book, I always fear that I’ll never write again. It takes a lot of time. You always think if you could just do something else – but nothing else makes me as happy.”
― Claire Messud
“I digress a lot – it’s how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity.”
― Claire Messud
“You can’t make a character do something they wouldn’t do.”
― Claire Messud
“Because we moved so much, I was always having to adapt and work out the lay of the land. So I felt envious of those who did not have to try.”
― Claire Messud
“Place and displacement have always been central for me. A type of insecurity goes with that: you are always following the cues, like learning the dance steps when the dance is already under way.”
― Claire Messud
“I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last.”
― Claire Messud
“As a reader, I have always enjoyed ‘ranty’ books, but they are all written by men.”
― Claire Messud
“I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.”
― Claire Messud
“Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren’t the world.”
― Claire Messud
“Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives.”
― Claire Messud
“Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don’t even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine.”
― Claire Messud
“I remember going to a son’s friend’s bar mitzvah, and the text that he chose to explicate was right at the beginning of Genesis. It was not about a fall from grace or a fall from perfection; it was about an awakening into consciousness, which is what it means to be human.”
― Claire Messud
“If it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.”
― Claire Messud
“We think that we know people from this constellation of points: ‘I know that story. I know that girl. I’ve heard that story a thousand times.’ But actually, you never know that story.”
― Claire Messud
“I’m a big believer in the complex realities of young people’s lives.”
― Claire Messud
“At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn’t really have anything to fight for.”
― Claire Messud
“For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life’s experience in some semblance of its complexity – for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.”
― Claire Messud
“In the world I’ve lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don’t live in that world.”
― Claire Messud
“The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void – for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.”
― Claire Messud
“In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.”
― Claire Messud
“I actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson.”
― Claire Messud
“I liked the idea of being from ‘somewhere else.’ I do think that’s inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition.”
― Claire Messud
“If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am.”
― Claire Messud
“I always feel as though I’m not quite Canadian enough for everybody.”
― Claire Messud
“At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath?”
― Claire Messud
“When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father’s French, and I speak French, and there’s a kind of struggle in me that says, ‘I’d like to be French.’ But I’ve never been fully part of that culture, that role.”
― Claire Messud
“As a kid, I used to tell all these stories. I remember meeting a childhood friend, and we were talking. We remembered that I had made up this story about going to Mars. And she looked at me and said, ‘I didn’t sleep for a week after that!’”
― Claire Messud
“There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and under-linings they are irreplaceable, but I sometimes wish they’d just vanish.”
― Claire Messud
“To be weighed down by things – books, furniture – seems somehow terrible to me.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.”
― Claire Messud
“I don’t trust people who are likable.”
― Claire Messud
“We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.”
― Claire Messud
“Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, ‘Have you read that book?’ the answer would be ‘not personally.’”
― Claire Messud
“I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, ‘I’ve become the kind of crap you buy at airports!’ It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I’d ever had.”
― Claire Messud
“I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“For me, the ages between 9 and 12 were great because it was before you wore any masks, and you had some autonomy in the world. You had some freedom, and you felt you had unlimited ambition. It’s when you thought, ‘I’m going to write plays. I’m going to be president. I’m going to do this; I’m going to do that.’ And then it all falls apart.”
― Claire Messud
“For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. ‘The Waste Land,’ in particular.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“When you’re a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don’t need words. It’s almost like puppies in a – frolicking in a garden or something. You don’t articulate stuff. You just live it.”
― Claire Messud
“I remember laughing so hard as a kid.”
― Claire Messud
“We think that – as kids, you know – that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.”
― Claire Messud
“I wish I were a really good photographer.”
― Claire Messud
“The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling.”
― Claire Messud
“This sense in which so much of who we are doesn’t break the surface – our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore.”
― Claire Messud
“What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?”
― Claire Messud
“I have said it somewhere – our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.”
― Claire Messud
“We read to find life, in all its possibilities.”
― Claire Messud
“The relevant question isn’t, ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but, ‘Is this character alive?’”
― Claire Messud
“Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.”
― Claire Messud
“When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy’s ‘Childhood,’ his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think – that you can transmit something of what life is like now.”
― Claire Messud
“If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don’t know who I would be.”
― Claire Messud
“The people who don’t read – who are they? How do they make sense of things?”
― Claire Messud
“There’s this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.”
― Claire Messud
“I’m a different person in French. I’m a different person in New York. I’m a different person in Canada.”
― Claire Messud
“Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven’t had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.”
― Claire Messud
“Women aren’t supposed to want stuff. They’re not supposed to have high emotions.”
― Claire Messud
“If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what’s possible.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“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.”
― Claire Messud
“I’ve never been very practical or realistic – I’ve always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it?”
― Claire Messud
“I’ll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.”
― Claire Messud
“I always say to my students, ‘If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.’”
― Claire Messud
“If people like something you’ve done – or don’t like it – this shouldn’t determine what you write or how you write it. Those are two separate things entirely: your work and the world’s response to it.”
― Claire Messud
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