Siri Hustvedt

“My parents were gigantic influences on me. I had a deep hunger to impress my father, who was a professor and an intellectual. I wanted his approval.”

“In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don't have to be nearly as much d as women. I do not believe women are natively nicer than men. They may learn that niceness brings rewards and hat names ambition is often punished. They may ingratiate themselves because such behavior is rewarded and a strategy of stealth may lead to better results than being forthright, but even when women are open and direct, they are not always seen or heard.”

“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.”

“Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.”

“Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial.”

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

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

“There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.”

“Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be done carefully.”

“Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.”

“I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night.”

“Only the unprotected self can feel joy.”

“We chart delusions through collective agreement.”

“My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.”

“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”

“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.”

“The third-person or 'objective,' static, reductive models used in most science are important and yield significant results, but they have their limitations.”