Claire Messud Quotes

Quotes about:

• It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves.

  Claire Messud

  Lying, Fall, People

  FaceBook post by Claire Messud from Aug 10, 2016

  42 Copy quote

• Anyway, these books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

  Claire Messud

  Book, Writing, Men

  39 Copy quote

• I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.

  Claire Messud

  Years, Names, Sorrow

  Claire Messud (2013). “The Woman Upstairs”, p.55, Vintage

  26 Copy quote

• That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.

  Claire Messud

  Party, Ideas, Way

  FaceBook post by Claire Messud from Jan 20, 2013

  25 Copy quote

• If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?'

  Claire Messud

  Reading, Character, Alive

  "Would You Want to Be Friends With Humbert Humbert?: A Forum on 'Likeability'". www.newyorker.com. May 16, 2013.

  44 Copy quote

• Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate.

  Claire Messud

  Heart, Fire, Sorrow

  FaceBook post by Claire Messud from Sep 04, 2014

  35 Copy quote

• The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.

  Claire Messud

  Art, Human Experience, Humans

  4 Copy quote

• Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

  Claire Messud

  Genius, Biographies

  Claire Messud (2015). “The Emperor's Children: Picador Classic”, p.288, Pan Macmillan

  16 Copy quote

• There's a reason why trainspotters are not girls, there's a reason why there's the myth of the slightly autistic male genius, there's a reason why Gertrude Stein believed that her self-presentation was male. One could argue that was Susan Sontag also. The things that we associate with femaleness are not the single-minded, exclusive pursuit of a vocation, whether it be art or anything else. It is not a model that is widespread in our culture, it's not something we think of for women.

  Claire Messud

  Girl, Art, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through.

  Claire Messud

  Dream, Laughing, Way

  Claire Messud (2013). “The Woman Upstairs”, p.153, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

  Claire Messud

  Possibility

  6 Copy quote

• I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

  Claire Messud

  Peculiar, Pennies, Currency

  FaceBook post by Claire Messud from Sep 07, 2014

  5 Copy quote

• When you are the woman upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you “best of all.” It's a small thing, you might think, and maybe it depends on your temperament, maybe for some people it's a small thing, but for me [...]

  Claire Messud

  Mother, Love You, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have -- that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.

  Claire Messud

  Who I Am, People, Giving

  Claire Messud (2013). “The Woman Upstairs”, p.24, Vintage

  9 Copy quote

• But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

  Claire Messud

  Memories, Home, Ideas

  Claire Messud (2013). “The Woman Upstairs”, p.118, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• Popular success is a wonderful gift if it happens, but like money, it's not the motivation. 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 people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.

  Claire Messud

  Art, Motivation, Moving

  Source: www.slate.com

  4 Copy quote

• The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked… Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.

  Claire Messud

  Wall, Book, Self

  FaceBook post by Claire Messud from Aug 23, 2012

  4 Copy quote

• It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

  Claire Messud

  Fashion, Skins, Mask

  Claire Messud (2013). “The Woman Upstairs”, p.25, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Claire Messud

  Dream, Children, Husband

  Claire Messud (2013). “The Woman Upstairs”, p.18, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Claire Messud

  Dog, People, Abiding

  "Midlife and Fantasy at 42 — Claire Messud’s New Novel Resonates". Interview with Heidi Legg, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 2, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Claire Messud

  Art, Believe, Home

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Claire Messud

  Writing, Students

  Source: www.slate.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Claire Messud

  Art, Children, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

  Claire Messud

  Writing, Essentials, World

  "Claire Messud and Robin Desser". Interview with Robin Desser, www.slate.com. May 3, 2013.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Claire Messud

  Path, Easy

  Source: www.slate.com

  4 Copy quote

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