Quotes from Claire Messud

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.

Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid.

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?

But our friendship was, at the same time, like a city you hadn't visited in a long time, where you know the streets by heart but the shops and restaurants have changed, so you can find your way from the church to the town square, no problem, but you don't know where to get ice cream or a decent sandwich.

Just because someone tells you in a reasonable way that you aren't really feeling what you're feeling, it doesn't make the feeling go away.

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.

But we don't really know anything at all, except how the story should go, and we make believe it's our story, hoping everything will turn out okay. The difference is that onstage, or in a film, we acknowledge the artifice, we accept that we've made a world that excludes what we ignore. Like gods, we invent a world that makes sense.

I don't believe something's important simply because I'm told it's important; and the inverse, perhaps more crucially, is also true: something isn't unimportant simply because it's been largely overlooked by others.

Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in the chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized-a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle-then this only makes the pictures the more mine.

It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that nobody we knew had ever really seen the building: it was the sort of thing you wished you'd done, without actually wishing to do it.

We wouldn't be proper children if we didn't disregard our parents' most vital instruction.

But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive.

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.

But you see, everyone has a part to play. In this theater, I'm a daughter and a sister and a mother—never an artist. I could be, I don't know, Luc Tuymans, and it would mean nothing to them. They allow no room for anything but my duty.

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.

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.'

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.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

For me, the ages between 9 and 12 were great because it was before you wore any masks, and you had some autonomy in the world. You had some freedom, and you felt you had unlimited ambition. It's when you thought, 'I'm going to write plays. I'm going to be president. I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that.' And then it all falls apart.

Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all.

Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.

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.

If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge; it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it.