Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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Siri Hustvedt

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 19, 1955

I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.

Siri Hustvedt

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.

Siri Hustvedt

We all live in a culture that is continually isolating feminine and masculine aspects, even when they're not related to people.

Siri Hustvedt

People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.

Siri Hustvedt

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

Siri Hustvedt

If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.

Siri Hustvedt

It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!

Siri Hustvedt

I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive.

Siri Hustvedt

I have suffered from migraines since childhood and have long been curious about my own aching head, my dizziness, my divine lifting feelings, my sparklers and black holes, and my single visual hallucination of a little pink man and a pink ox on the floor of my bedroom.

Siri Hustvedt

I found myself fascinated by neuroscience, attended a monthly lecture on brain science at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and was invited to become a member of a discussion group devoted to a new field: neuropsychoanalysis.

Siri Hustvedt

I bought myself a rubber brain, familiarized myself with its many parts, listened intently, and read more. In fact, I read obsessively, as my husband has told me repeatedly. He has even suggested that my rapacious reading resembles an addiction.

Siri Hustvedt

Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

Siri Hustvedt

I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist.

Siri Hustvedt

Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.

Siri Hustvedt

Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.

Siri Hustvedt

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'

Siri Hustvedt

Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.

Siri Hustvedt

There was a film class in my high school in Northfield, Minnesota, which was very unusual. I saw my first Buster Keaton film there, aged about 15. It made a gigantic impression on me.

Siri Hustvedt

I watched 'Holiday' in college, and that was when I had my first fantasy of being Katharine Hepburn, standing at the top of the staircase in a huge Hollywood mansion.

Siri Hustvedt

I am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly.

Siri Hustvedt