Zitat des Tages von Claire Messud:
I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think.
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 don't trust people who are likable.
Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, 'My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?'
I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.
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.
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.
As any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we'd planned.
It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that.
To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.
In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them.
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.
Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.'
For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite.
I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.
As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.
A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.
If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am.
We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.
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.
The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling.
For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.
At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for.
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 had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
My husband had a stalker, briefly.
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've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it?
I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.
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 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.
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.
As a kid, I used to tell all these stories. I remember meeting a childhood friend, and we were talking. We remembered that I had made up this story about going to Mars. And she looked at me and said, 'I didn't sleep for a week after that!'
The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things?
I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody.
If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.