Top 144 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.

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

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.

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.

There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so.

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.

I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.

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.

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

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.

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

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

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.

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.'

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.

My husband had a stalker, briefly.

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.

I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last.

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.

Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren't the world.

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.

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.

For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will?

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

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

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.

Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch.

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.

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

As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.

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?'

I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider.

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

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.

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

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

I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.

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.

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.