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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. "
Siri Hustvedt
High School
Film
Class
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" It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agency and control: the inability to relinquish high self-reflexive consciousness for the vulnerable, ignorant regions of slumber in which we know not what we do. "
Siri Hustvedt
Know
Fall
Control
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
Empathy
Sympathy
Hard
" My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, my three sisters, and their families. "
Siri Hustvedt
Daughter
Mother
Husband
" I enjoy domestic life. Cooking gives me great pleasure, especially if I can chop vegetables slowly and think about what I'm doing and dream a little about this and that. "
Siri Hustvedt
Cooking
Think
Enjoy
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
Better
Manipulation
Editing
" We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want. "
Siri Hustvedt
Really
Imagine
Want
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
Love
Walk
Time
" I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian. "
Siri Hustvedt
Growing Up
Mother
Up
" When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poor. "
Siri Hustvedt
I Am
Sleep
Concentration
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
People
Stress
Brain
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
Deep
Who
Parents
" 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.' "
Siri Hustvedt
Believe
Book
God
" I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist. "
Siri Hustvedt
Going
Artist
Before
" I have suffered from migraines since childhood and have long been curious about my own aching head, my dizziness, my divine lifting feelings, my sparklers and black holes, and my single visual hallucination of a little pink man and a pink ox on the floor of my bedroom. "
Siri Hustvedt
Pink
Childhood
Long
" 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
Am
Physician
Interested
" Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future. "
Siri Hustvedt
Hope
Always
Creativity
" There is a difference between using a made-up name and using real people as pseudonyms. People are not costumes you can wear. They are flesh and blood. "
Siri Hustvedt
Difference
Blood
People
" Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid. "
Siri Hustvedt
Sometimes
Morbid
Cannot
" Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself. "
Siri Hustvedt
Desire
Curiosity
Born
" Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts. "
Siri Hustvedt
Serious
More
Men
" I love the little garden in the back of my family's brownstone in Brooklyn. Digging out there in the dirt is a joy for me, although by the time August rolls around and my roses have black spot, I need the break winter provides. "
Siri Hustvedt
Joy
Black
Family
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
Perspective
World
Truth
" It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering! "
Siri Hustvedt
Books
Through
Suffering
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
Children
Feel
Voice
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
Expectations
Future
Place
" Sigmund Freud was very much a creature of his time. He did not 'invent' the unconscious. "
Siri Hustvedt
Time
Did
Very
" None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world. "
Siri Hustvedt
Social
World
Live
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
College
Staircase
Holiday
" 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. "
Siri Hustvedt
Brain
Memory
Research
" Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in the middle of the night - all these are so common among children, it seems fair to call them 'normal.' "
Siri Hustvedt
Children
Bed
Night