Claire Messud

“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.”

“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.”

“Place and displacement have always been central for me. A type of insecurity goes with that: you are always following the cues, like learning the dance steps when the dance is already under way.”

“There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so.”

“If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.”

“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.”

“The Strauss allowed me to be a writer. Without it, 'The Emperor's Children' would not exist. When I received the award, I was teaching, had one baby, and was pregnant with another. There was no time for writing.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.”

“Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren't the world.”

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

“I don't trust people who are likable.”

“It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.”

“In midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck.”

“If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know.”

“Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch.”

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