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"I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them."
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"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"Never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own."

"On the whole, stories don't write themselves."

"Be an artist, in whatever little faculty possible.For the Earth, without 'Art' is just 'Eh"

"Let's pursue the visage of imagination."

"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."

"If you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain..."

"The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!"

"Creativity is the residue of time wasted."

"Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt


"There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in."


"It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no."


"No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself."


"But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.''You don't believe that.''I think I do.''You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.''Don't be a sophist,' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.''I don't mean that,' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies."


"Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover."


"When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn't convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a "sick society," the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics."


"It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth."


"The idea that skiing might not be fun, might not be for everyone, had never occurred to me. Where I come from, the sport signified pleasure, nature, family happiness."
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