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" Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine. "

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" I digress a lot - it's how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity. "

Claire Messud

Experience

Clarity

Need

" I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback. "

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

Claire Messud

People

Hurricane

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

Claire Messud

Down

Things

" Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life. "

" In the world I've lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don't live in that world. "

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

" The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety. "

" There is that time right around 30 when you think, your twenties have gone by, and now you really are a grown up, and you do have to figure out what you're going to do. "

" 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 husband had a stalker, briefly. "

Claire Messud

Husband

Had

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

Claire Messud

Write

British

" The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?' "

Claire Messud

Alive

Potential

" I wish I were a really good photographer. "

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

" If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge; it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it. "

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

Claire Messud

Reading

Waste

" 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 you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human. "

" I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong. "

" 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. "

" If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am. "

" At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath? "

Claire Messud

Than

Day

" Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about. "

Claire Messud

Question

Serious

" Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives. "

" I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play. "

" I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had. "

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

" The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art. "

" 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. "