Claire Messud Quotes

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

When I write, I want something to sound good itself.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

So I think I sometimes will put a cliche in and then just pad it out so you're not noticing.