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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
Happened
Remember
Writing
Never
Like
Remembering
Fiction

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.
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Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
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There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.
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All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
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Memory changes as a person matures.
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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
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The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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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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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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
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Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.
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Men generally do not see women as competition.
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
Siri Hustvedt
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No matter how brilliant or accomplished they are, there is something emasculating for men in being pitted against a woman. It is even more true in creative fields already considered to be squishy and feminine, and it's a big problem because great women have been left off the record.
Siri Hustvedt