10 Quotes by Siri Hustvedt about fiction


  • Author Siri Hustvedt
  • Quote

    Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.

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  • Author Siri Hustvedt
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    A powerfully imagined event can evoke the same emotions as a real event. Few artists would contradict this, and yet there no doubt people who would find it odd that a fiction, when fully imagined, can create something parallel to the disruptions in madness, but what Freud called "sublimation" is the transformation of inner dramas, fears, and wounds into something else: a work of art outside the body of the artist.

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  • Author Siri Hustvedt
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    The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don't think so. And I don't think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths.

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  • Author Siri Hustvedt
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    I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.

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  • Author Siri Hustvedt
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    The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

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