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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Siri Hustvedt

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Siri Hustvedt
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 19
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Northfield
Minnesota
Premio princesa de Asturias 2019
Remembering
Fiction
Happened
Remember
Writing
Never
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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.
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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.
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In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.
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The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.
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Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.
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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?
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Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.
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That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.
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Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
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Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.
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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
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We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.
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I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
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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.
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Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.
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Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.
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