Claire Messud Quotes

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

I have not left any calamity more hurtful to man than woman.

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.

Where anger can be seen as a relative positive in a man, it is hardly ever perceived as anything other than a negative in a woman.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

It's a very difficult thing for people to accept, seeing women act out anger on the screen. We're more accustomed to seeing men expressing rage and women crying.

Men are superior to women, for one thing they can urinate from a speeding car.

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

In order for a man to be truly evil, he must be a woman.

Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.

A man who cooks is very sexy. A woman who cooks is not that sexy. Because it's associated in our mind to the domestic cliche of the woman.

Men think a woman should not have an opinion.

I don’t have any respect to men who send women out to do their fighting for them.

The oppression of women is based on custom and tradition—not religion.

… male religious leaders have had -- and still have -- an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.

We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else.

It's okay for a guy to be a baddie, but a woman? No, we can't deal with that.

Most of the time, you can beat a woman in an argument.

When a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse.

We're not accustomed to giving women the space to express the full range of emotions and flaws that men are permitted. Anger and aggressiveness aren't part of the scale of what is acceptable behavior in women, whereas men - in reality and in fiction - are allowed a much fuller range of emotion.

A woman's desire is either terrifying, or it's ignored.

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

We don't have enough young, female antiheroes. We don't accept women as antiheroes the way we do the men.

I don't hate women - they just sometimes make me mad.