Quotes by Siri Hustvedt

About Siri Hustvedt:

Siri Hustvedt is an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, six novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books include: The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros (2006), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010), The Summer Without Men (2011), Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), and The Blazing World (2014). What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Having children is one of the most passionate and involving bits of business in human life.

Siri Hustvedt

Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.

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

Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.

Siri Hustvedt

In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath.

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

Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality.

Siri Hustvedt

The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of d...

Siri Hustvedt

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

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

That's one of the great lies of intimacy, to pretend you know everything - you cannot. No matter how close you've been, over however many years, there remain secrets. I think we all know that - that you don't tell everybody everything.

Siri Hustvedt

Our great cultural error is to assume that 'truth' arrives only through reductive theories.

Siri Hustvedt

I enjoy domestic life. Cooking gives me great pleasure, especially if I can chop vegetables slowly and think about what I'm doing and dream a little about this and that.

Siri Hustvedt

I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

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

Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.

Siri Hustvedt

The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences.

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'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life h...

Siri Hustvedt

Nobody knows what either sleep or waking consciousness is, even though these two have long been seen as the two sides of being: part of life's unvarying diurnal rhythm.

Siri Hustvedt

I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster.

Siri Hustvedt

Author Bio

  • NameSiri Hustvedt
  • Descriptionnovelist, essayist, poet
  • BornFebruary 19, 1955
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Author; Novelist