Women aren’t supposed to want stuff. They’re not supposed to have high emotions. Claire Messud Read Quote
If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what’s possible. Claire Messud Read Quote
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. Claire Messud Read Quote
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. Claire Messud Read Quote
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. Claire Messud Read Quote
I’ve never been very practical or realistic – I’ve always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? Claire Messud Read Quote
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. Claire Messud Read Quote
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!’ Claire Messud Read Quote
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 Read Quote