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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts. Siri Hustvedt Read Quote
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 has quite come close to that. Siri Hustvedt Read Quote
I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist. Siri Hustvedt Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine. Siri Hustvedt Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Siri Hustvedt Read Quote
I am married to a writer, and this – writing – is an odd enterprise. It’s something we both support very strongly. Siri Hustvedt Read Quote