Claire Messud Quotes

I have trouble actually describing myself because I'm always suspicious of people who start describing themselves. I'm like, "OK, why are you trying to tell me what you are?"

I know very well the difference between my image and who I am.

I don't think anyone really knows me.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

It's important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.

We are not what other people say we are. We are who we know ourselves to be, and we are what we love. That's okay.

And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.

'M Train' is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything. I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.

You know, most people really don't know me.

Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.

I'm not what I make.

Coming off 'Reflection,' what we really wanted to do was be more vulnerable.

To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

You're who you think you are, even if you never admit it to yourself or to anyone else. You may be in the worst position to judge, but you're in the best position to know.

The journal and Gansey were clearly long acquainted, and he wanted her to know. This is me. The real me.

Try to figure out who you really are and not who you want other people to think you are.

People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?

We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.

I've often been accused by critics of being myself on-screen. But being oneself is more difficult than you'd suppose.

The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.

We are the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then.