Siri Hustvedt Quotes

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

I don't think anyone really says anything new.

Everything has been said but not everyone has yet said it.

If you don't have anything different to say, don't say it at all. That's my rule.

There's always a way to say something that could seem really commonplace and make it special again.

Borrowed eloquence, if it contains as good stuff, is as good as own eloquence

Things you think you're saying for the first time ever, have been said better before by Shakespeare, though they may need saying again.

A new language requires a new technique. If what you're saying doesn't require a new language, then what you're saying probably isn't new.

I think of language as our first music.

And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

Never be afraid of a cliché, if it expresses what you wish to say.

I'm definitely one of those people that what comes into my head falls out of my mouth. That's a way for me to be even more creative, to sort of get the ball rolling and start parlaying off of somebody and interacting. That charge or that friction sometimes - if it's positive or negative - is inspiring, and it gets people to be I think creative, maybe.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate and learn, discover and invent.

The word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create the events in your life. The word is the most powerful tool you have as a human; it is a tool of magic.

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.

The words are easy - most of them have already been invented.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do" "Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

A man without words is a man without thought.

Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts.

about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that insight.

It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.