Zitat des Tages von Siri Hustvedt:
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.
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.
With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, are only fully embraced very late in their career.
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.
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.
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.
The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.
Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.
Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.
The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.
There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
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.
The computer model will be replaced by an organic model, in which the brain-mind is embodied - part of a whole, dynamic, living organism: one driven by emotional forces, not only cognitive ones.
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.
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 have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.
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.
Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be done carefully.
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.'
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.
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.
When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poor.
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.
I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster.
None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.
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.
Having children is one of the most passionate and involving bits of business in human life.
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.
There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.
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.
If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.