Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.

Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you're so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try

We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating

I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.

We have to make mistakes, its how we learn compassion for others

Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.

I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women.

I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors

I don't think it's shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing.

Obviously the bar is much higher now for a behavior to be scandalous. Social media has really changed the way people live. It's not a new impulse; it's just being enacted in a new way.

My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man

Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

... it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself.

I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?

Of course a magazine is usually more interesting than a conversation, because so much more time and preparation has gone into it.

Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.

She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

I think I would have liked to have been a twin... Sometimes my sisters and I get mistaken for twins, and I always take it as a compliment.

I'm SO trying to give up meat.

It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

In life we're most hell-bent on proving things that we're not really sure are true.

There are a lot of things in the world that are a lot weirder than psychic abilities, that we accept as true.

I'm able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are.

I guess I consider myself at times to have intuition.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

She nodded, jotting something in her notebook. You’re writing that down? Has the interview started?” Lee, whenever you’re talking to a reporter, you’re being interviewed.

There are so many people who are so much better qualified to write about politics than I am.

I think that there's some confusion in my own mind about what I believe.

I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.

I feel like as I've gotten older I've unfortunately come to the decision that a lot of people who seem normal and boring maybe are normal and boring.

What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?

I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.

There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.

When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs.

I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.

I feel like a lot of life is distasteful and embarrassing. And you just push through it. You fix what you can, and you let time pass.

She really does like him, she likes lying next to him, she wants to be around him; when you get down to it, can you say that about many people?

I feel like if you read something, and it makes you so curious about a topic that you then go read something else, that's exciting.

When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.

I'm not afraid of writing about sensitive subjects, but I want to be careful how I do so and I know not all readers will think I have been, of course.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That's the entire story, and if he doesn't kiss you, there is never a reason to wait around for him.

The better you learn to take care of yourself, the less you settle for being around people who can't or won't treat you as well as you're accustomed.

High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.