I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
From Siri Hustvedt
Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.
Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'
Having children is one of the most passionate and involving bits of business in human life.
Rage has such focus. It can't go on forever, but it's invigorating.
There was a film class in my high school in Northfield, Minnesota, which was very unusual. I saw my first Buster Keaton film there, aged about 15. It made a gigantic impression on me.
I watched 'Holiday' in college, and that was when I had my first fantasy of being Katharine Hepburn, standing at the top of the staircase in a huge Hollywood mansion.
7 perspectives
5 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives