My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family.

Claire Messud

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

If you live in a family or have five roommates, there's some sort of reality check, but when you live alone, there's a lot more leeway for your fantasy life to be more and more a part of your everyday life.

Claire Messud

Life Family Art

I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last.

Claire Messud

Who Very T

If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.

Claire Messud

Life Your You

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.

Claire Messud

You Writing Would

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.

Claire Messud

You Write Used

You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.

Claire Messud

You Would Thing

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.

Claire Messud

Time Space Music

If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.

Claire Messud

Anger Woman Us

The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'

Claire Messud

Van Tent Ten

There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.

Claire Messud

Power Mom Men

I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives.

Claire Messud

Young People Young You

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.

Claire Messud

Great Freedom Art

Because we moved so much, I was always having to adapt and work out the lay of the land. So I felt envious of those who did not have to try.

Claire Messud

Work Work Out Who

In midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck.

Claire Messud

Life Wish Vice

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

Claire Messud

Will Waters Water

I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.

Claire Messud

Where Tan T

We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.

Claire Messud

Us UN T

At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath?

Claire Messud

Would Wood Woo

I was in my senior year of high school when I read 'Notes From Underground' by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn't known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way.

Claire Messud

Mom Men Art

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!'

Claire Messud

My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family.

Claire Messud

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.

Claire Messud

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.

Claire Messud

If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know.

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.

Claire Messud

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.

Claire Messud

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

Claire Messud

My tendencies are much more the Henry James thing, where we sit in silence at the table for three minutes, and our whole lives are changed because of a revelation that never quite happens but almost bubbles to the surface.

Claire Messud

I've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it?

Claire Messud

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.

Claire Messud

Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives.

Claire Messud

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

Claire Messud

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

Claire Messud

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

For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.

Claire Messud

We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.

Claire Messud

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

Claire Messud

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

Claire Messud

As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.

Claire Messud

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.

Claire Messud

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

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.

Claire Messud

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.

Claire Messud

Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch.

Claire Messud

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

Claire Messud

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.

Claire Messud

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 those people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.

Claire Messud

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

Claire Messud

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.

Claire Messud