1) The first is an interview with Claire Messud at Guernica, including quotes from the novelist such as the following:
"There are, too, particular questions that seem to me more
gendered. Questions of wanting to be an artist, and what does that mean, what
makes you an artist? Are you an artist if you’re in a gallery in New York and
not an artist if you’re doing it at home? Do you need legitimation to count? If
you’ve been acculturated to believe that you have certain obligations—familial,
social, human—if multitasking has been your forte and that’s what’s been
praised and rewarded, where do you find the single-mindedness, the selfishness
to do something like art? I think those are questions that arise differently
for women and for men."
"Someone asked me, Is it hard to understand Nora’s rage? And I
said, No, not at all. Nora’s rage is maybe different from mine. But I think if
you had a Venn diagram there would be some overlaps. That first chapter was the
first part I wrote and it came to me in a volley.
When we were in Germany [for a fellowship] I read from it and
there was a Dutch anthropologist in his sixties and he came up to me afterwards
and said when he was growing up he never saw his mother angry. Saturday morning
was cleaning day and she would go upstairs and his father and the children
would all be sitting in the kitchen and would hear her cursing at the top of
her lungs while she was changing the beds and sweeping the floor. And then she
would come back downstairs smiling, and they would all go on as if they hadn’t
heard. They never spoke of it.
I think there’s a lot of rage that rises from always being the
good one."
"The extent of her anger is directly
commensurate with the grandeur of her hope. It’s the enormousness of her
disappointment."
"I think there’s no question that there’s a reason why small
children make great art and why slightly bigger children don’t. And it’s
because small children don’t worry about what anybody else thinks and slightly
bigger children start to worry about these things. So, we can call it
selfishness, but I think these are often names that make us feel better: you
know, wow, I would never be that selfish. But it certainly takes some
single-minded commitment, whether that’s selfishness or selflessness I don’t
know."
2) And this compilation of authors on failure, from The Guardian, including:
"Art is made by those who
consider themselves to have failed at whatever isn't art. And
of course it is loved as consolation, or a call to arms, by those who
feel the same. One of the reasons there seem to be fewer readers for
literature today than there were yesterday is that the concept of
failure has been outlawed. If we are all beautiful, all clever, all happy, all
successes in our way, what do we want with the language of the dispossessed?" Howard Jacobson
"Success as the worldly
estimate it is, is rarely a subject for literature. Gatsby cannot possibly get
Daisy. Dorothea Brooke cannot be allowed to change the world. Thus does art get
its own back on those without the imagination to fail." Howard Jacobson
"The criticism, no matter how virulent, has
long since ceased to bother me, but the price of this is that the praise is
equally meaningless. The positive and the negative are not so much
self-cancelling as drowned out by that carping, hectoring internal voice that
goads me on and slaps me down all day every day." Will Self
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