285 Quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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

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

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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