Claire Messud Quotes

I want to be able to do anything. I know it's probably not reasonable to expect, but that's what I'd like to do.

There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine.

Everything is so dreamy when you are young. After you grow up it kind of becomes -- just real.

I... allowed my memory to journey back to the days when I was a boy of ten, full of health and optimism, when my wonder at the great game of living had yet to give way to disillusionment at its shabbiness.

I was probably nine or ten the first time I heard there was no Santa Claus.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

That feeling of freedom, open highways of possibilities, has kind of been lost to materialism and marketing.

Life has no limitations, except the ones you make.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn't as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

It's been exciting to be able to go forward with stuff without 10,000 people saying, It should be like this.

If you have no authority to legislate my freedoms, then I'm truly free, at least from you.

I often wonder if I had the complete freedom to not have to write, if I would write. That's the one mystery that I hope I get to experience.

We are not going to subjugate ourselves to a constitution ... signing away all our rights and agreeing to be slaves.

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is of right, absolute.

Freedom of choice can harm no one.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

I can really write what I want. I can take time; I can do nothing for a year. That is paradise.

We are under no delusions as to the innate goodness even of very small children. They are bad a great deal of the time, but before it has been knocked out of them, they see no limit to the potentialities of the human will. Theirs is the faith to move mountains, because they do not yet know the fearful heft of them.

Well working by yourself, especially when no one knows about it, is totally liberating because it's very impulse-driven. You work when you want to work. You work when you can work. No deadlines. No conversation. No compromise. No help.

I literally just do whatever I want to do.

The nice thing about working with BOOM! on 'Irredeemable' and 'Incorruptible,' man, was they let me have my head. No one said boo about anything.

Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.

Nothing is stopping me from doing anything. I haven't got a golden handcuff.

He wondered whether growing up was learning that most stories turned out to be lies.