Siri Hustvedt

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

“Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others.”

“I was happy without having sought happiness.”

“Every time the DSM prepares for a new edition, there are countless groups lobbying to get their particular mental illness recognized by the diagnostic manual. Surely, this is a social and cultural phenomenon.”

“I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.”

“We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.”

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

“Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.”

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

“The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don't think so. And I don't think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths.”

“The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.”

“Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.”

“It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no.”

“Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.”

“The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.”

“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.”

“Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.”

“Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.”

“I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something.”

“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.”