Quotes from Claire Messud

The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.

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

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.

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

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.

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 wish I were a really good photographer.

Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.

I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody.

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.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will?

Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.

Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.

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.

In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.

I digress a lot - it's how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity.

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.

To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.

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

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 actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson.

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

Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.