A Quote by 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

Quote Topics

America Backgrounds Because European Gave Henry Huge James Me Relatives Respecting Still Understand Way While

Quote Author

Claire Messud
American - Novelist
Born: 1966

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

Susan Wiggs

The savagery and power of Edith Wharton's ghost stories surprised me.

Michael Dirda

While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

Joseph Epstein

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

Vladimir Nabokov

This is a glorious biography ... The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on this scale ... Lee the biographer pursues her subject down every winding corridor, into every hidden passage and dark corner ... Her critical exploration of Edith Whartons work is dazzlingly assured ... A feat of exhaustive research, and finely tuned to Whartons creative achievement at the same time ... [Wharton] could scarcely have failed to be impressed by ... its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception.

Mark Bostridge

...and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hand on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him - Clare

Audrey Niffenegger

I think I'm too indoctrinated. I'm going to use everything I can, and I think if I used an advertisement in that one, it would be yet another way to connect the current day with Wharton. Wharton has been perceived sometimes as being too upper class; Wharton was an extraordinary social thinker. As relevant today as anyone, so she uses some language that isn't current, but to me, I'm so happy about that because I get so bored with the 100 words that people mostly use.

Lynne Tillman

I had been a zealous writer of journals my whole life, and beginning my newspaper column gave me a huge sense of purpose while enabling me to understand my own emotions by reading them in black and white.

Shweta Bachchan Nanda

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

Joyce Carol Oates

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

Helen Vendler

'The Buccaneers' was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.

James Frain

The Buccaneers was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.

James Frain

My two goals are to read everything Edith Wharton has ever written and to have an art collection.

Kellie Martin

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

Ray Bradbury

I'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.