Claire Messud

“I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“We think that we know people from this constellation of points: 'I know that story. I know that girl. I've heard that story a thousand times.' But actually, you never know that story.”

“I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things.”

“Obstruction can be caused by so many factors - perfectionism, distraction, faltering confidence, external demands and pressures. At some point, of course, you've got to push through it all if you're to write, and if you don't, or can't, you're sunk.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?”

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

“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.”

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

“At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for.”

“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.”

“Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.”