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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
Writing
Never
Like
Remembering
Fiction
Happened
Remember

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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Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.
Siri Hustvedt
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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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A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
Siri Hustvedt
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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
Siri Hustvedt
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There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
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
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Memory changes as a person matures.
Siri Hustvedt
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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
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.
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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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt