Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" When I finish a book, I always fear that I'll never write again. It takes a lot of time. You always think if you could just do something else - but nothing else makes me as happy. "

Claire Messud

Fear

Book

Think

Related Quotes:

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

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

" We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else. "

" I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody. "

" As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants. "

" For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will? "

Claire Messud

People

Hurricane

" In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them. "

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

" It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that. "

" 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. "

Claire Messud

Heart

Live

" To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me. "

Claire Messud

Down

Things

" I'd wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself. "

" You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do. "

" 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

Woman

Missing

" Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged. "

" If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. "

" Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, 'My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?' "

" I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea. "

" I don't trust people who are likable. "

" 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. "

" You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift. "

" I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, 'You get an A-minus for your life.' And it's not true. It's not true. "

" When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role. "

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

Claire Messud

Write

British

" If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be. "

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

" When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now. "

" This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore. "

" My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family. "

" I actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson. "