Claire Messud Quotes - Page 2

There questions of wanting to be an artist, and what does that mean, what makes you an artist? Are you an artist if you're in a gallery in New York and not an artist if you're doing it at home? Do you need legitimation to count? If you've been acculturated to believe that you have certain obligations - familial, social, human - if multitasking has been your forte and that's what's been praised and rewarded, where do you find the single-mindedness, the selfishness to do something like art? I think those are questions that arise differently for women and for men.

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.

I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? I'll always find the hardest path.

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

I think there's no question that there's a reason why small children make great art and why slightly bigger children don't. And it's because small children don't worry about what anybody else thinks and slightly bigger children start to worry about these things.

The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained.

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.

I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure - the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit - is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough -- or I misunderstood what strength was.

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. Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than other women who think: Oh, goodness, well, if I let the lid off, where would we be?

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.

To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.

I measure my life out in books." "You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?

I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.

Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?).

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

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

But we're lost in a world of appearances now.