Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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Siri Hustvedt

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 19, 1955

In sleep, we leave behind the sensory stimulation of the outside world.

Siri Hustvedt

Every mental state is also physical.

Siri Hustvedt

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

Siri Hustvedt

We live in a culture that is much happier talking about organic brain disease than about psychic illness because the former suggests that something that is physically wrong in a brain is wholly unrelated to that person's upbringing or experiences in the world, but that is not necessarily true.

Siri Hustvedt

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

Siri Hustvedt

Sigmund Freud makes people irritable. Whenever someone mentions Freud, say, at a dinner party, I see eyes roll and listen to the nasty remarks that follow.

Siri Hustvedt

Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments.

Siri Hustvedt

Sigmund Freud was very much a creature of his time. He did not 'invent' the unconscious.

Siri Hustvedt

Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct.

Siri Hustvedt

I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject.

Siri Hustvedt

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

Siri Hustvedt

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

Siri Hustvedt

If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York.

Siri Hustvedt

I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.

Siri Hustvedt

While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.'

Siri Hustvedt

There is a difference between using a made-up name and using real people as pseudonyms. People are not costumes you can wear. They are flesh and blood.

Siri Hustvedt

With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, are only fully embraced very late in their career.

Siri Hustvedt

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

Siri Hustvedt

I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.

Siri Hustvedt

Being a mother is complicated because it's not just a paternal culture making demands on you; it's those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.

Siri Hustvedt