Claire Messud

The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.

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.

I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and under-linings they are irreplaceable, but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish.

I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

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

In making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety.

For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.

I digress a lot - it's how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity.

I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think.

When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.