Quotes By Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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'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 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'm so trying to give up meat.

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

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