Top 55 Claire Messud Quotes

The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.

I’ve never been very practical or realistic – I’ve always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it?

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

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.

Women aren’t supposed to want stuff. They’re not supposed to have high emotions.

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.

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.

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?’

It’s still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that.

The relevant question isn’t, ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but, ‘Is this character alive?’

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.

Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.

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.

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.

The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling.

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.

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.

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.

As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.

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.

I always say to my students, ‘If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.’

I wish I were a really good photographer.

If it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.

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.

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.

I’m a different person in French. I’m a different person in New York. I’m a different person in Canada.

My husband had a stalker, briefly.

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.

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.

Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, ‘Have you read that book?’ the answer would be ‘not personally.’

You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It’s both a loss and a gift.

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.

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.

I’d wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself.

I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition.

We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.

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.

I don’t trust people who are likable.

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.

I have said it somewhere – our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.

I’ll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.

The people who don’t read – who are they? How do they make sense of things?

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!’

If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am.

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.

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.

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.

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don’t know who I would be.

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.

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.

We’re all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.

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.

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.

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.

To be weighed down by things – books, furniture – seems somehow terrible to me.