To be weighed down by things – books, furniture – seems somehow terrible to me. Claire Messud Read Quote
I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman. Claire Messud Read Quote
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. Claire Messud Read Quote
I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world. Claire Messud Read Quote
I always say to my students, ‘If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.’ Claire Messud Read Quote
I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe. Claire Messud Read Quote
When you’re a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don’t need words. It’s almost like puppies in a – frolicking in a garden or something. You don’t articulate stuff. You just live it. Claire Messud Read Quote
If it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. Claire Messud Read Quote
