“Popular success is a wonderful gift if it happens, but like money, it's not the motivation. The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.” PeopleArtBookMovingMotivationEffortWonderful Author:Claire Messud
“The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked… Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.” BookSelfMomentsRoomsRecordsWallPeriodsPureDearApartmentBlankSpineSlateBlank Slates Author:Claire Messud
“Anyway, these books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.” IfsMenWritingBookWantedLastsVoiceDangerousMissingReaderAngryChorusAngry Women Author:Claire Messud
“I measure my life out in books." "You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?” ShouldBookCorrectionsMeasuring Book:The Emperor's Children: Picador Classic Source: The Emperor's Children: Picador Classic
