American - Novelist | February 19, 1955 -
I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist.
Siri Hustvedt
ArtistEveryoneGoingWriterKnew
I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
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Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
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Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.
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Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'
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Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.
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There was a film class in my high school in Northfield, Minnesota, which was very unusual. I saw my first Buster Keaton film there, aged about 15. It made a gigantic impression on me.
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I am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly.
I AmSupportWritingSomethingOdd
My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.
MemoryWritingConfusedYouLookUp
Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.
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That's one of the great lies of intimacy, to pretend you know everything - you cannot. No matter how close you've been, over however many years, there remain secrets. I think we all know that - that you don't tell everybody everything.
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I garden. It's very relaxing to me.
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