Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of emotional honesty in storytelling, even when the story itself is fictional.
Siri Hustvedt suggests that while fictional narratives may not be bound by factual accuracy, the essence of the story should maintain emotional truth. This idea reflects on the moral responsibility of writers to convey genuine feelings and experiences, allowing readers to connect authentically with the characters and scenarios presented, even in invented situations.
In practice
During a writing workshop, you might quote this to emphasize the importance of emotional honesty in character development.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
I think that if it is - has to do with global warming, or if it has to do with raising the minimum wage, or if it has to do with lowering prescription drugs for vulnerable citizens - all of those things are people issues, not Democratic issues or Republican issues.
All legitimate government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily agreed upon by the parties to it, for the protection of their rights against wrong-doers. In its voluntary character it is precisely similar to an association for mutual protection against fire or shipwreck.
Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?
Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
We live in a bewildering world.
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