If people like something you've done - or don't like it - this shouldn't determine what you write or how you write it. Those are two separate things entirely: your work and the world's response to it.
— 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?
Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.
Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.
The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things?
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.
I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.
The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling.
I remember laughing so hard as a kid.
If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.
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.
I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had.
I don't trust people who are likable.
To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me.
There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so.
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?
I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition.
I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.'
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 ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible.
I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada.
If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.
The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'
What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?
I wish I were a really good photographer.
When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a - frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it.
Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.
Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.
Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.'
I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.
I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and under-linings they are irreplaceable, but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish.
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!'
I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody.
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.
I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.
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.
Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.
There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.
When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now.
We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore.
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.
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.
For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.
I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.
We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it.
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.
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.
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.
If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am.
