Claire Messud

If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. ”

As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men. ”

You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift. ”

I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider. ”

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. ”