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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. "

Siri Hustvedt

Think

Great

Know

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" The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends. "

" I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject. "

Siri Hustvedt

Physician

Interested

" 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. "

" Rage has such focus. It can't go on forever, but it's invigorating. "

Siri Hustvedt

Invigorating

Forever

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

Siri Hustvedt

Support

Writing

" Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective. "

" I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both. "

" If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York. "

" Many scholars working in the humanities have already shown interest in brain research. For years, contemporary theory in the humanities has left the body and biology out of their discussions. "

" Sigmund Freud makes people irritable. Whenever someone mentions Freud, say, at a dinner party, I see eyes roll and listen to the nasty remarks that follow. "

" 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. "

" While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.' "

" Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I found myself fascinated by neuroscience, attended a monthly lecture on brain science at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and was invited to become a member of a discussion group devoted to a new field: neuropsychoanalysis. "

" 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. "

" The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine. "

" I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location. "

" The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams. "

" I bought myself a rubber brain, familiarized myself with its many parts, listened intently, and read more. In fact, I read obsessively, as my husband has told me repeatedly. He has even suggested that my rapacious reading resembles an addiction. "

Siri Hustvedt

Reading

Myself

" 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. "

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

" There are no rules in art. "

" I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense. "

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