Claire Messud Quotes
Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate.
I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.
That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.
To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.
It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.
I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.
I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.
I always say to my students, if you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.
I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? I'll always find the hardest path.
I measure my life out in books." "You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?
Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.
As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.
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.
Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?).
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.
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’m not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don’t seek a wide swath of feedback.
The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.
I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.
