Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedtis an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, six novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books include: The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros, The Sorrows of an American, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, The Summer Without Men, Living, Thinking, Looking, and The Blazing World. What I Loved and The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 February 1955
CityNorthfield, MN
CountryUnited States of America
Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.
Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
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.
The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]
Years ago, when I was in Siena for the first time, I saw the works of Duccio, whose deeply emotional painting from the thirteenth century has never left me.
When I was an impoverished graduate student, I would sometimes spend $20 or $30 on a T-shirt or accessory I didn't need or even particularly want. What I craved was the purchase, not the thing itself. Of course, a sense of not being deprived may fill an emotional void without ruinous consequences.
When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poor.
I watched 'Holiday' in college, and that was when I had my first fantasy of being Katharine Hepburn, standing at the top of the staircase in a huge Hollywood mansion.
My parents were gigantic influences on me. I had a deep hunger to impress my father, who was a professor and an intellectual. I wanted his approval.
I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.
Our great cultural error is to assume that 'truth' arrives only through reductive theories.
It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.
I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.