Claire Messud

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

— Claire Messud

To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.

— Claire Messud

“Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality.”

— Claire Messud

“I’m a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private.”

— Claire Messud

“How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking…

— Claire Messud

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

— Claire Messud

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

— 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…

— Claire Messud

“And it explains much about me, too, about the limits of my experience, about the fact that the person I am in…

— Claire Messud

Place and displacement have always been central for me. A type of insecurity goes with that: you are always following the cues,…

— Claire Messud

“who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It’s the most precious gift I…

— Claire Messud

“Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the…

— 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…

— Claire Messud

“It continued to amaze me how the touch of skin on skin had altered things: curled in the crook of his arm,…

— Claire Messud

For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Claire Messud

The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art…

— Claire Messud

The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that…

— Claire Messud

“My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir -…

— 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…

— 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…

— Claire Messud

“Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden heart’s desires. Life,…

— Claire Messud

“...a strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food…”

— Claire Messud

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

— Claire Messud

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

— 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

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

— Claire Messud

“Cassie could be affectionate and scornful at the same time, and I always felt that if I wasn't careful, the scorn might…

— Claire Messud

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

— Claire Messud

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

— Claire Messud

I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? I'll always find the hardest path.

— 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

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

— Claire Messud

“was suddenly aware, almost in a panic—a joyful panic—of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself.”

— Claire Messud

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

— Claire Messud

Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.

— Claire Messud

“Have you ever asked yourself whether you’d rather fly or be invisible?”

— Claire Messud

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

— Claire Messud