American - Novelist | 1966 -
In the world I've lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don't live in that world.
Claire Messud
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In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition.
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If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am.
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I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody.
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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?
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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.
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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!'
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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.
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