Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

I guess because twins have this mystique, and triplets - I think the normal sibling connection potentially can be very powerful, and there's this idea that it's even more powerful. It really is, not just someone like me, but another version of me.

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

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

Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive.

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

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.

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.

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

I just think that people are complicated, both men and women.

It happens that I write more about women.

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.

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

I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.

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 just write the books that I think I would want to read.

... 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 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.

If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience.

You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you.

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?

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.

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

At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion.

Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box was sealed, the door was shut, you were no longer immersed in the confusing middle.

There are people we treat wrong and later we're prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.

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'm so trying to give up meat.

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

I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites? She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, and I thought, You're sixteen. How can you already be a Republican?

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.

And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o'clock - these are enough. They are gifts.

Later on, when I tried to imagine how I might have ruined things, that would occur to me - that I'd so rarely resisted, that I hadn't made it hard enough for him. Maybe it was like gathering your strength and hurling your body against a door you believe to be locked, and then the door opens easily - it wasn't locked at all - and you're standing looking into the room, trying to remember what it was you thought you wanted.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, "I need a little more psychological realism."

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.

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

I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.

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

I like it when characters are some combination of appealing and maybe flawed or self-interested. I think in terms of scenes, and what I want a scene to achieve, and I think that the psychological realism arises from that.

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

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.

Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.

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

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.

But I never thought of who he wasn't, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn't even care what we talked about.

I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and then I didn't want to use it up, because what do you wish for then?

In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.

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

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

..and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren’t funny.

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

I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas.