Siri Hustvedt Quotes

The better the book the more room for the reader.

My readers - and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.

The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

When I read scripts and when I read books, it's more of an emotional response and I was really drawn to these characters.

Books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive

Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

The writer after all is only half the book, the other half is the reader.

Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.

Whether it's friendship or love. The essence of is two people trying to share something. When I think of how I met my best friends, it was always like love at first sight.

If you're listening to music, then the music is your friend; or if you're with a person, then that person can be your friend because you're communicating.

If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.

Any time you talk to anyone about something that they love, they're, like, their most beautiful. It's a cool gift to get to talk to people about what they love.

When I read the books, I imagined that the family of Ron Weasley was my family.

Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?

By making the place and the people and the feelings real, by the time someone closes the cover of one of my books, they have, hopefully, felt all of the emotions of life.

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.

the process of a book's coming to life is not fully complete until your imagination meets mine on the page. The words evoke pictures and something altogether new is created, something different from the limits of my own skills and imagination. Something that is a marriage between your heart, mind, and body - and mine.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

We shared. Parents. Home. Pets. Celebrations. Catastrophes. Secrets. And the threads of our experience became so interwoven that we are linked. I can never be utterly lonely, knowing you share the planet.

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.

You don't love a girl because of beauty. You love her because she sings a song only you can understand.