Siri Hustvedt Quotes

In not having an appointment at Harvard, I'm in the company of a great many people whose work I admire tremendously, in particular women of color.

... to say that men are the only ones who can have this experience is ludicrous, and to say that for these reasons: "there will never be any really great women writers in the theatre," is equally funny because as a rule women know not only what men know but much that men will never know.”

I've heard about productions where it still happens: yellow face, taping up the eyes. It's hard to talk about it in a constructive way.

People are making a lot more noise about representation and diversity. But I think modeling is one of the professions where people can be kind of racist.

I'm slightly obsessed with women's history, so I'd love to talk to Emily Dickinson or Louisa May Alcott.

I'm not finding fault or blaming the industry, but the heroes have always dominated the film industry.

There aren't a lot of roles for sleepy-eyed black dudes.

The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.

As an ethnic female in wrestling, there will be people reading my words and I want to set an example. I did experience racism.

Women have been writing strong women characters for a long time - hello, Maxine Hong Kingston! - it's just taken mainstream comics a really long while to catch up.

Hollywood is hard on everyone, but it really is harder on women and people of color.

The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.

This year women learned that if we aren't at the table, we're on the menu.

The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.

Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.

I think that why the research and the data are so important is because you become so used to seeing the world one way that you don't even notice anymore. [Gender inequality] has this invisibility.

Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us.

I can say that if you're a writer who happens to be a woman, you'll get a book cover that depicts a woman with no head, or a woman turning away, or a pair of high heels. You have to fight to not get stuck with these covers. In the U.S. women are chick-lit writers unless they prove otherwise, and that's frustrating.

I'm discriminated against all the time.

Malcolm X was the national spokesperson of the N.O.I., and he wasn't represented in their own newspaper for over a year.

In my long, long years toiling around the publishing industry, I've found that women simply don't stick to the writing with the same fervor that men do.

I had met far more discrimination because I am a woman than because I am black.

During years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country, I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals. All for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman.

The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way.

For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.