Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

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

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

- 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

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

- Curtis Sittenfeld

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

- Curtis Sittenfeld

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

- 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

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

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

- 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

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

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

- 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

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

- Curtis Sittenfeld

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.

- 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

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

- Curtis Sittenfeld

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.

- Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm so trying to give up meat.

- Curtis Sittenfeld

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

- Curtis Sittenfeld

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

- Curtis Sittenfeld

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