Claire Messud
Claire Messud
Claire Messudis an American novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the novel The Emperor's Children...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
writing world way
Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.
dream children husband
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,
art human-experience humans
The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.
heart concern ifs
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.
writing way groups
I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.
mother love-you thinking
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 [...]
writing voice missing
I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.
being-sad sauce way
Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?),
dream laughing way
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.
mean love-is events
Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you tell me that I don't know what love is?
wise departure afar
As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.
mother dream grief
And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.
fashion skins mask
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.
genius biographies
Geniuses have the shortest biographies.