Siri Hustvedt Quotes

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

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.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Whenever I sign books, I get this line over and over again from men: "I don't read fiction, but my wife does. Would you sign the book to her?" What are those men doing there? And where are their wives?

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.

I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.

Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.