Latest Claire Messud Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

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

  Claire Messud

  Writing, Students

  Source: www.slate.com

• I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? I'll always find the hardest path.

  Claire Messud

  Path, Easy

  Source: www.slate.com

• Popular success is a wonderful gift if it happens, but like money, it's not the motivation. 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 people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.

  Claire Messud

  Art, Motivation, Moving

  Source: www.slate.com

• We live in a funny time, a funny era, when desire, to be adult desire, has to be conceived as sexual. And that didn't used to be the case. Sexuality is a social construction as much as anything else and I think the realities of sexuality don't always fit into the social constructions that we have, and we live in a goal-oriented time - on all fronts.

  Claire Messud

  Reality, Thinking, Desire

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There's a reason why trainspotters are not girls, there's a reason why there's the myth of the slightly autistic male genius, there's a reason why Gertrude Stein believed that her self-presentation was male. One could argue that was Susan Sontag also. The things that we associate with femaleness are not the single-minded, exclusive pursuit of a vocation, whether it be art or anything else. It is not a model that is widespread in our culture, it's not something we think of for women.

  Claire Messud

  Girl, Art, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think that one of the great things about spending - as in my case - twenty-something years with somebody is that at some point you do love the actual person. They're there little by little, the outline is really pretty clear.

  Claire Messud

  Thinking, Great Things, Really Pretty

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think there's no question that there's a reason why small children make great art and why slightly bigger children don't. And it's because small children don't worry about what anybody else thinks and slightly bigger children start to worry about these things.

  Claire Messud

  Art, Children, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There questions of wanting to be an artist, and what does that mean, what makes you an artist? Are you an artist if you're in a gallery in New York and not an artist if you're doing it at home? Do you need legitimation to count? If you've been acculturated to believe that you have certain obligations - familial, social, human - if multitasking has been your forte and that's what's been praised and rewarded, where do you find the single-mindedness, the selfishness to do something like art? I think those are questions that arise differently for women and for men.

  Claire Messud

  Art, Believe, Home

  Source: www.guernicamag.com