84+ Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes On Education, Friendship And Marriage

Curtis Sittenfeld is an American writer best known for her novels, which include Prep, American Wife, and Sisterland. Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories. She has also written a collection of essays about her life, entitled You Think It, I'll Say It. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Curtis Sittenfeld on education, love, friendship.

Top 10 Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

1. We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.
2. I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.
3. We have to make mistakes, its how we learn compassion for others
4. 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.
5. I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
6. 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.
7. Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.
8. I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
9. The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.
10. Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.

Curtis Sittenfeld Short Quotes

• I think that there's some confusion in my own mind about what I believe.
• I guess I consider myself at times to have intuition.
• There's a lot that's not explained about the universe. And psychic-ness is not stranger than that.
• In life we're most hell-bent on proving things that we're not really sure are true.
• I'm so trying to give up meat.
• I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
• I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.
• Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.
• What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?
• When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.

Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes About People

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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? — Curtis Sittenfeld

If I'm at somebody's house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

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

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes About Write

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

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

Curtis Sittenfeld Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

... 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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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? — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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? — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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? — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

..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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

If you’re a parent in 2013, you have to get your hands on this book. Wise, engrossing, and so real that I fear Senior has been spying inside my house, All Joy is a must-read for those of us whose lives have been enriched and derailed by having kids. — Curtis Sittenfeld

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Ordinarily, of course, I thought it best to remain inconspicuous, but the gesture had a certain irresistable theatricaility, and an inevitablility. Sometimes you can feel the pull of what other people want from you, and you sacrifice yourself, you risk seeming odd or sunsavory, to keep them entertained. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

I actually liked the disolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were to ever kill myself, I thought it would be in the summer. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Before and after... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true. — Curtis Sittenfeld

I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will--that is the part that's almost unbearable. — Curtis Sittenfeld

And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument? — Curtis Sittenfeld

Of course, I didn't imagine then that I could have had a real relationship with any guy. I thought that by virtue of being me I was disqualified. — Curtis Sittenfeld

... nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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

After I’d told her – the mall, the taxi, Cross stroking my hair – she said, ‘Did he kiss you?’ ‘John and Martin totally would have seen that,’ I said, and as I felt myself implying the circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people – for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling. — Curtis Sittenfeld

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. — Curtis Sittenfeld

She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions. — Curtis Sittenfeld

To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Life Lessons by Curtis Sittenfeld

1. Curtis Sittenfeld's writing often explores themes of identity, self-discovery, and the power of choice. She encourages readers to embrace the unknown and to take risks in order to grow and discover their true selves.
2. Through her stories, Sittenfeld emphasizes the importance of being open to change and of learning from mistakes. She encourages readers to take control of their own lives, to be brave and to strive for happiness.
3. Sittenfeld's work also encourages readers to be kind to themselves and to others, to be honest, and to have faith in their own abilities and potential.