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" We live in a culture that is much happier talking about organic brain disease than about psychic illness because the former suggests that something that is physically wrong in a brain is wholly unrelated to that person's upbringing or experiences in the world, but that is not necessarily true. "

Siri Hustvedt

Brain

Culture

Live

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" There are no rules in art. "

" All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static. "

" It's thought that about 96% of us have visual imagery, and there's a very tiny minority in the population, some of whom are normal, some of whom have brain lesions, who cannot produce visual imagery. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poor. "

" 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. "

" I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980. "

" The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment. "

" As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young. "

" Hysteria is something that I've been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it's unlikely. "

" I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist. "

" The third-person or 'objective,' static, reductive models used in most science are important and yield significant results, but they have their limitations. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be done carefully. "

" I've come to understand that migraine is a part of the personality. I have migraine troughs. These often follow high productivity. I have a hypo-manic phase, then I'll crash. "

Siri Hustvedt

Personality

High

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it. "

Siri Hustvedt

Knowing

Sometimes

" American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me. "

" 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. "

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

" Our great cultural error is to assume that 'truth' arrives only through reductive theories. "

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

" We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want. "

" 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. "

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