CLAIRE MESSUD

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

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We think that we know people from this constellation of points: 'I know that story. I know that girl. I've heard that story a thousand times.' But actually, you never know that story.

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

I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada.

The Strauss allowed me to be a writer. Without it, 'The Emperor's Children' would not exist. When I received the award, I was teaching, had one baby, and was pregnant with another. There was no time for writing.

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.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.

I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.

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.

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

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.

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.

Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all.