Writer Quotes by Siri Hustvedt

I am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly.

— Siri Hustvedt

Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.

— Siri Hustvedt

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

— Siri Hustvedt

“Writing novels means being plural, being divided among your creatures and suffering with them.”

— Siri Hustvedt

I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist.

— Siri Hustvedt

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

— Siri Hustvedt

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

— Siri Hustvedt

“The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.”

— Siri Hustvedt

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is…

— Siri Hustvedt

“I am afraid of writing, too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where…

— Siri Hustvedt

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded…

— Siri Hustvedt

The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on…

— Siri Hustvedt

Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason,…

— Siri Hustvedt

“Again, I don't fully understand my emotion response to the library or trust it. It was the site of a series of…

— Siri Hustvedt

“but the fact is that New York is as much a myth as a place, and because we all participate in that…

— Siri Hustvedt

Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know…

— Siri Hustvedt

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to…

— Siri Hustvedt

“Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past…

— Siri Hustvedt

“In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries - the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery.…

— Siri Hustvedt

“Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from…

— Siri Hustvedt

“It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the…

— Siri Hustvedt

“I loved it so much I was sorry to finish it. I closed the book and shocked myself by thinking, This is…

— Siri Hustvedt

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

— Siri Hustvedt

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

— Siri Hustvedt

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

— Siri Hustvedt

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

— Siri Hustvedt

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

I bought myself a rubber brain, familiarized myself with its many parts, listened intently, and read more. In fact, I read obsessively,…

— Siri Hustvedt

“and although the young writer never met his literary mentor, the spiritual connection between the two writers would never be dissolved.”

— Siri Hustvedt