Claire Messud

“For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.”

“Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.'”

“There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.”

“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.”

“If people like something you've done - or don't like it - this shouldn't determine what you write or how you write it. Those are two separate things entirely: your work and the world's response to it.”

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

“We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.”

“As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.”

“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'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada.”

“I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.”

“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.”

“We read to find life, in all its possibilities.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible.”

“I remember going to a son's friend's bar mitzvah, and the text that he chose to explicate was right at the beginning of Genesis. It was not about a fall from grace or a fall from perfection; it was about an awakening into consciousness, which is what it means to be human.”

“The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things?”

“Because we moved so much, I was always having to adapt and work out the lay of the land. So I felt envious of those who did not have to try.”