Siri Hustvedt Quotes

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

History consists of facts attested to by evidence.

For me, writing a historical novel was really hard. I love history as a subject and majored in it in college. I think, in a way, my training made it worse for me because I knew how important it was to focus on document-based analysis, and I really didn't want to get stuff wrong.

Drawing on real life is what novelists do. It's not the same as reconstructing real life, which is what historians do.

The historian has a special obligation to sobriety and fidelity to the record.

Sometimes a novelist can get closer to the truth than the historian can.

The matter does not appear to me now as it has appears to have appeared to me then.

It is therefore necessary that memorable things should he committed to writing, and not wholly betaken to slippery memory which seldom yields a certain reckoning.

All history, so far as it is not supported by contemporary evidence, is romance.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

Lies are beginning to be solidified and made into historical fact…. The truth is all I want for history.

Writing history takes a great deal of imagination. I don’t mean making things up, but you have to be able to transport yourself to another time.

All history professors tell lies in their classrooms. That is what they get paid to do.

As soon as anything is processed by memory, it’s fiction.

Herodotus was more like the world’s first blogger than an objective historian. He blends events, myths, anecdotes, hearsay into a great story. But nobody in their right mind believes it’s all true.

As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.

I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

Autobiography should be more stringent. It should adhere more to the standards of journalism - assuming that journalism has the truth. The memoir gives you more scope, is more poetic, and allows you to play around with your own life.

I write and teach creative nonfiction. I was a reporter.

I can understand pulling a book whose contents have been questioned - after all, false information has a way of sticking in your brain and seeming true when you go to retrieve it years later.

I try not to take any liberties when it comes to being factual. Sometimes you have to, just to make the song sound good. But I feel like, personally, if you've lived it, then you shouldn't stretch the truth. It should be that experience.

Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy.

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.