Claire Messud

“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.”

“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.”

“As any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we'd planned.”

“Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.”

“My husband had a stalker, briefly.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life.”

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

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

“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.”

“An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.'”

“Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all.”

“I was in my senior year of high school when I read 'Notes From Underground' by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn't known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way.”

“I've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it?”

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

“I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think.”

“In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.”