Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

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.

Sigmund Freud was very much a creature of his time. He did not 'invent' the unconscious.

Both depression and anxiety disorders, for example, are repeatedly described in the media as 'chemical imbalances in the brain,' as if spontaneous neural events with no relation to anything outside a person's brain cause depression and anxiety.

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

Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.

Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.

I myself have perceived women's actions as more aggressive than I would have in men because I too am walking around with my own biases. The way to fight them is to become conscious of them.

The old story is true:Women have to be less emotional than men.

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.

Men generally do not see women as competition.

There are no rules in art.

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

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

It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!

The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences.

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.

In sleep, we leave behind the sensory stimulation of the outside world.

Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct.

I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive.

I have not been diagnosed with epilepsy. I did have an MRI of the brain, and they found no abnormalities in my brain. Now, there are people with epilepsy who have completely normal MRI's, too. I just think also, you know, epileptic seizures can be triggered by emotional stress, by all kinds of things, lights.

Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial.

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

Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.